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names82360378
names82360378
Participant
March 25, 2015
Answered

Why adobe flash player slows down all browser's performance?

  • March 25, 2015
  • 1 reply
  • 19183 views

I rememeber longer ago there were problems with flash player plugin inside Mozilla's Firefox browser causing the plugin to crash: Adobe Flash plugin has crashed - Prevent it from happening again | Firefox Help

After a recent update (17,0,0,134) it almost never crash but it slows down all browsers performance untill it finally launches next video. Almost the majority of all news sites use flash player

to launch its' commercial. And it has several such boxes with commercials, for example: www.lrytas.lt

And while I'm listening to music via youtube and on the other tab reading news on that site, when music clip ends and the browser starts to load other music videoclip,

then the whole browser's work is paralysed - I can't write text, cannot scroll down, cannot click any link. All this is because the system is busy while in youtube next clip is loading.

Mouse marker becomes into round rotating circle indicating loading procedure (firefox is not responding). And it takes time - up to 10-15 seconds to launch new video. Then sudenly all my actions is executed after such pause - my text is typed,

my scroll down  and maybe link is pressed. All this slowing down procedure is annoying. It wastes a lot of time. I open task manager and I see that Firefox is taking 900.000 or 1300.000 K of memory. My OS is Windows 7.

I close whole firefox.exe process and then it automatically close plugins. Then I open the browser again and it ask to automatically recover interrupted sites, I agree with it and then it opens everything again. And again

it is working continuously for some time untill slows down browser again. With more tabs more problems. Moreover, view of a video sometimes comes too late too. Some images are lost as system is too late already because

loading procedure took too much resources.

Long long ago flash player was better. But today with a rise of new shitty substandart computers like iphones ipads you have to evolve the player in such a way that it has to play on everything, but its performance on different platforms

is not the same.

Who is guilty - my PC, Firefox or the plugin? Or maybe I am?

In My Cold Opinion, users actions can't be ignored. The preference should be user's continuous control over a system load.

    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer names82360378

    Yes, two processes is normal.  See the inside protected mode article above for more details.

    You might try disabling hardware acceleration, as described here:

    Video playback issues

    If that doesn't help, submit a couple crash reports and give me the links, and I'll be happy to take a look at them.

    Go to about:crashes

    Click on the first link, and copy the address of the resulting page. Paste it into a reply.  You don't need to wait for the report to load.

    Repeat for the first few crashes.

    Thanks!


    From now everything works well. No more complains. I mean without any hardware acceleration disable. It was after some windows or firefox update.

    1 reply

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    March 25, 2015

    I think what you're describing is a symptom where there is high CPU usage for a long time when a new stream starts.  That's not normal behavior.

    It's also interesting that you're seeing the really high memory consumption in the Firefox process itself, and not in the FlashPlayerPlugin_xxx.exe processes, which indicates that it's not Flash.  It feels like a misbehaving plug-in to me.

    In Firefox, if you go to Help > Restart with Add-Ons Disabled, do you see the same problems?

    names82360378
    names82360378Author
    Participant
    March 26, 2015

    You are right about high CPU usage. It was even when playing various computer games. I don't have problems anymore. But not because I disabled all addons. I did these things:

    1. In the Location bar, type about:config and press Enter. The about:config "This might void your warranty!" warning page may appear. Click I'll be careful, I promise! to continue to the about:config page.
    2. Search for dom.ipc.plugins.flash.disable-protected-mode in the list of preferences.
    3. Double-click on the preference to toggle its value from false to true. (If the setting is already true it means that Flash Protected Mode is currently disabled.)
    4. Close Firefox.
    5. Restart Firefox.

    And since then I don't have that particular problem with overloading. I just disabled some of flash protected mode. How is that related with "overloading"? Strage. Hardware acceleration I've enabled again as without it whole text field in news sites is sometimes black.


    Thanks anyway Mr.

    jeromiec83223024
    jeromiec83223024
    Inspiring
    March 26, 2015

    While you do lose the overhead of protected mode that way, you also put yourself at a significantly increased risk for malware infection.  Protected Mode for Firefox has been very effective in protecting users against malware threats, but it comes with some costs.

    You can learn more about protected mode here:

    Inside Flash Player Protected Mode for Firefox

    At the time, our only option was to retrofit a solution to Firefox and the NPAPI.  We're now in the early stages of an engagement with Firefox to bring users modern security defenses with a more efficient, integrated architecture.  That's going to happen over the course of months though.

    If you're not doing anything super important with this machine (banking, healthcare, etc), then the risk might be acceptable to you.  If not, you might want to take a look at other browsers to see if you get better performance with modern security protections.

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