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Anonymous
November 11, 2016
Question

Flashplayer clogging up my computer

  • November 11, 2016
  • 1 reply
  • 247 views

I have a 3 year old PC w. Windows 10 (loaded against my will).  I use Firefox as my browser.

Every now and then (sometimes once a day, sometimes every 30 seconds) I'll notice the internet is very slow, or stopped altogether.  Then I go to Task Manager and I'll see that Adobe Flashplayer (23.0) is running at several hundred MB, and a few times it had been running over 1000 MB.  I shut it down, and the internet frees up again and I can do whatever I want.  Like I said, it may not clog again for hours, or it may clog up in a few seconds.

When this happens, I may have a few pages open.  But it isn't like I am running 6 Youtube videos while trying to surf the internet at the same time............  Maybe AOL might be up  (yeah, i know, I'm an old fossil), and an Ebay page, Google search, etc.....................

Its very annoying.  Is there some kind setting to click so that Flashplayer doesn't automatically "take off running" and go up to 100's of MB on its own...............

(or something like that)

Thanks

Dan

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    1 reply

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    November 14, 2016

    This is almost certainly related to advertising on a page that you're viewing.  What is most likely happening, is that the page is loading in new ads every n seconds, and never unloading them, so over a period of hours, the page has a ridiculous number of Flash objects in use. 

    If you were using Edge as an example, it would actually pause the page once it was no longer visible, so you probably wouldn't see this problem, but Firefox will run JavaScript on the page (which is probably doing the actual loading of the zillion individual concurrent Flash assets) for as long as it's open.


    Ultimately, this is a really bad practice on the part of the content provider and/or ad network, but it's unfortunately all too common, particularly with some of the smaller ad distribution networks.

    I rarely recommend this, but to maintain the status-quo with regard to browser and behavior, installing a reputable ad blocker would probably solve this in the short term.  You can probably use your browser's developer tools to figure out who the offender is (just look for the one that's still loading stuff in the network tab 30 minutes after the page loaded).  If it's someone small that you want to support, dropping them a line to let them know that their advertising approach is abusive and causing you to reluctantly block their ads would probably be a welcome gesture.

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    November 14, 2016

    Oh, and just to explain the performance thing, the memory usage is growing up until the point that physical RAM is exhausted, at which point it begins to cache memory to disk.  The disk is about 100,000x slower than doing those operations in physical RAM, which is why the performance is terrible (and your hard disk probably sounds pretty busy).  If this is a laptop, this is probably about the time when your battery life starts to drop precipitously as well.

    Another thing that you might want to consider is moving to a 64-bit variant of Firefox.  It's not going to solve this specific problem, but it's *much* better than 32-bit Firefox on Windows 10 for a whole list of reasons.  It will be faster and more stable in general, and might tolerate running those pages for longer without swapping memory to disk, just depending on how much RAM is in your machine.

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