FLash Player using excessive CPU time

[dpaulovich]

I am using Windows 10 on a fairly new Dell desktop. If I enable Flash, Windows Edge becomes unusable because of excessive Flash use of CPU time. If I disable Flash the problem goes away, however I can't use content requiring Flash. I've run virus scans, did a clean boot and searched the Internet for answers with no luck. Anybody have any suggestions.

[Carm01]

Could be the website you are going to perhaps?

Also does this happen on another browser by chance?

Furthermore please run windows updates to make sure there are no pending updates as that is how Flash player is maintainted through Microsoft not Adobe

Best Regards

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Thanks

[dpaulovich]

- Website is MSN.com. Seems more prevalent with multiple tabs.

- Google Chrome operates without this problem.

- Windows is up to date.

[Carm01]

The only last thing I could suggest is to re-install EDGE

I have done this myself, it is not a nice thing and Microsoft has made it a nightmare I have not scripted this one yet, and should sometime in the future.

http://www.techtantri.com/how-to-reinstall-microsoft-edge-browser/

Since your issue does not exist in Chrome for example this falls back to a 100% Microsoft EDGE issue, not an Adobe one.

If you decide to attempt to re-install EDGE i suggest you launch Powershell directly from the elevated command prompt as the windows 10 app does not work with the script. That command is:

start powershell

If you don't do this right you might not get it back and you take 100% of the risks involved. If you are worried do a system restore point, but I will not be able to assist with this, and I doubt anyone on here will.

Once again you are on your own if you attempt it and you bork up your machine.

Best Regards

Please be sure to mark my post here helpful or answered if I assisted you

Thanks

[jeromiec83223024]

On my Surface Pro 4, I can fire up a half-dozen MSN video tabs and my CPU usage is sitting at 11%.

In engineering work, specificity is key, and the exact links for a handful of videos that consistently reproduces this scenario for you would be useful in definitively understanding whether or not I've successfully recreated the scenario you're describing.

From what you're saying, it sounds like we're not able to use hardware acceleration on your machine, and there *is* an upper limit to the number of video streams (3-4) you can run simultaneously before we drop back to software, and/or exhaust the available GPU RAM, even when hardware acceleration is operating normally.  Video decoding in software is CPU intensive (which is why we like to offload it to the dedicated video hardware).  It's also the case that the publisher has to configure their streams to use hardware acceleration.  Not all video providers use the StageVIdeo object when publishing Flash content, so it's *always* done in CPU.  This is one of those cases where we can't remain backwards compatible *and* prevent content providers from shooting themselves in the foot.

While Edge does attempt to minimize the cost of opening tons of parallel tabs, you're dealing with finite resources, and tabs that are playing media are frequently exempted from the "pause when offscreen" kinds of logic, to facilitate things like listening to Pandora streams in a background tab.  If you're seeing reasonable CPU usage with 2-3 tabs (indicating that hardware acceleration is working) and then things fall apart when you add subsequent tabs with videos, there's a good chance that's what you're looking at.  It's also worth pointing out that both Flash and Edge are hardware accelerated, so HTML and Flash content are sharing the same finite GPU resources.  A single Flash tab and a bunch of HTML tabs could create the same kind of GPU resource contention, depending on the content in play.

If that's not the case (CPU usage is high even with a single tab playing Flash video), the output of dxdiag (described in the video troubleshooting guide below) would be useful in helping me identify what your hardware and drivers are, to see if I can provide a useful suggestion or find a similar machine in our lab.  There are a couple specific chipsets that I know aren't available to us when we try to use them (this is typically a driver bug), and we're working with the vendors on those.  I'm curious if there's overlap there.

Video troubleshooting guide:

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/video-playback-issues.html

If you're still stuck, please follow the directions in the guide on providing the dxdiag report and additional information about what you tested and saw.