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A
Anonymous
June 21, 2012
Question

Large Memory Usage in Flash Player 11.3.300.257

  • June 21, 2012
  • 11 replies
  • 108314 views

Jeromie Clark wrote:

Hi,


You should see two FlashPlayer_11_3_300_257.exe processes.  This is how Protected Mode in Firefox works.  It does *not* double memory usage. 

Having two FlashPlayerPlugin_11_3_300_257.exe processes may not double memory usage but your 'low-integrity heavy-lifter' process definitely has massive memory usage issues that need fixing.

As I type, this process is using 792MB of RAM all by itself.

Before the Flash update, Firefox's own 'plugin-container.exe' only ever used under 200MB at the very most  This is clearly unacceptable memory hogging by your new Flash process.

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      jeromiec83223024
      jeromiec83223024
      Inspiring
      June 21, 2012

      As the issue you're describing is distinct from the problem in the previous discussion, I've branched this into a new discussion so we can discuss it in more detail.

      Flash Player will use a percentage of your available memory.  It also has a garbage collection system that kicks in periodically, and we should not make your system crash or swap to disk excessively.

      If you've seen a significant increase in memory usage on a particular site between Flash Player 11.2 and Flash Player 11.3, or memory usage that grows indefinitely, that may be indiciative of a problem and we'd definitely want to investigate.

      If you can point us to specific links that demonstrate this issue, we'd be happy to take a look.

      Thanks!

      A
      Anonymous
      June 21, 2012

      This is the first page that I noticed racking up the high memory usage. I also experienced freezes (which is what got me looking at the task manager in the first place). Try opening all the different categories (e.g. Crime & Thrillers, Action & Adventure) in separate tabs.

      http://www.audible.co.uk/sp/2for1

      On a different note, in my opinion hogging a percentage of RAM is fundamentally uncool. Take only what you need. If I'm browsing but also doing something more RAM-heavy in the background, I don't want to be losing hundreds of unecessary MB of RAM to the Flash plugin.

      Firefox 13.0.1

      Windows 7 64bit

      8GB RAM

      jeromiec83223024
      jeromiec83223024
      Inspiring
      June 23, 2012

      In looking into this, what I see is normal operation.  You have 8GB of RAM available on your system, so we're talking about 10% of your available RAM.  Flash Player renders the content that providers write.  Resource usage is entirely dependent on what content authors are doing.  We do have some hard limits where we start trading off performance for memory consumption, but they're well above 10% of your system resources.

      When looking at audible.co.uk, what I'm seeing is that they load up 26 copies of their audio player and a couple SWFs for analytics, just on the Action & Adventure page. using about 75MB of RAM.  I also believe that each of those players is pre-caching the audio sample.  I don't see a media request happen after I click, and playback is instantaneous.  This pre-cached content would be stored in RAM.  The important part here is that the RAM is freed, once the tab is closed.  We use the necessary amount of RAM to render the content with good performance, then release it when we're done.  This is how software normally operates.

      When you load three tabs of audible content, you'll see that you've got more like 75 copies of their audio player simultaneously loaded, and a dozen SWFs for analytics, consuming about 225MB of RAM.  For grins, I loaded all of the categories, and capped out around 850MB.  RAM decreased proportionally as I unloaded each of the pages, and the Flash Player processes released all of their resources and unloaded when I closed all tabs with Flash content.  Again, this is normal behavior.

      By contrast, you can see that something like http://www.homestarrunner.com/intro.html consumes about 16MB of RAM, for a long vector animation with sound.  It's really all about what you're doing on the page, and how you author your content.

      We *are* very concerned about memory leaks.  If, for instance, Flash Player never released that memory after you closed the tabs, something would be wrong, and we'd want to fix it right away.  That's not what's happening here.

      If you're uncomfortable with the resources used by Flash Player, you could always use a plug-in like NoScript or FlashBlock to make the movies load on demand.  This would probably disrupt some of the typical browser experiences that just work, but you'd have much greater control over the use of your system resources.

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