YouTube + Flash Plugin + Firefox = CPU Cook

[Bloodwych]

Recently, with Firefox 2.0.0.11 and Adobe Flash 9.0.115.0, I've noticed a dramatic increase in CPU usage on websites that use the flash plugin.

Playing one video on youtube results in 50-60% CPU usage on a 2Ghz machine, spiking all over the place. Playing two videos results in performance loss!

Something's not right. Loads of people are running into this issue and I hope it's fixed soon. I have a laptop that I gave to my parents that's cooking everytime they go to youtube and it's starting to piss me off!

The same video downloaded and played in VideoLAN uses 0-1% CPU. Very annoying!!! Any of you guys noticed the hit?

This issue is helping to speed up global warming - someone should be sued!!!

[Harrison]

I've watched quite a few Youtube videos lately and haven't noticed any performance hits. I've even had them playing on one monitor while I'm doing other things on the other. I will take a look at my CPU usual next time I run one though just to see how much it uses up.

[Buleste]

Best thing to do would be to get Speedfan os you can see just how hot hot is.

[Bloodwych]

I have speedfan, but the temps are not causing a problem. The noise of the laptop fan speeding up is though!

All caused by this flash plugin's CPU usage - stupidly high - 50% for the "recently viewed" animated menu at the top of the youtube page. 60-70% for viewing one vid, spiking even higher at times!

Third party players use 0-1% CPU. Surely even flash, although cross platform, can't be that inefficient? If it is, that's an unacceptable waste of electricity and resources for simple tasks like moving around images!

I'm not sure if the Internet Explorer ActiveX plugin suffers from the same issue, probably not.

Thanks for checking your PC out Harrison. Very common problem according to Google. Some over at EAB have noticed it too.

[Buleste]

It may be a problem with Firefox just not working well with Flash in their current incarnations. Next update will probably solve it.

[Bloodwych]

It may be a problem with Firefox just not working well with Flash in their current incarnations. Next update will probably solve it.

You're probably right. Fingers crossed!

Have you noticed an issue with your Browser/Flash config?

[Buleste]

I use IE7 as although i like Firefox i've just not been anle to get into it. It works fine with Flash. I ran Ahmed at Christmas and CPU usage went up to 30% which is about normal for my 2.8 P4.

[Bloodwych]

Yes, I think that's what I used to get on my computer of similar speed, 14-30% on video playback. Considering that's a compressed format it's acceptable.

When you consider third party ones can do it for under 2%, it's still laughable! Obviously they're not cross platform friendly and probably have more hardware acceleration support.

[Harrison]

OK, I just played a couple of YouTube videos with the Windows Task Manager's Performance window open and it was using 15-20% CPU usage throughout the playback of all the videos I tried.

The PC is an Athlon 64 4000+, so isn't multi-core, with 2GB of ram.

The system also had a few things running in the background at the same time. Outlook 2003, Photoshop CS3, SmaprtFTP, and another Firefox window, so all that CPU time wasn't just being used by FF+Flash.

I think the biggest factor that could increase CPU usage for flash video playback would be a system with limited ram. 512MB or less. A Flash Video is always more likely to use more CPU resources than watching something using a dedicated video codec. Most recent CPUs and Video cards have built in support for direct video decoding on playback, whereas Flash video has to be played completely in software. It's the negative aspect of a format that is codec free, more portable and cross platform.

[Bloodwych]

I've managed to get the CPU usage back to a reasonable level, so I apologise for wasting time on this without properly testing.

I re-installed flash and restarted the computer - it's gone back to 14-30%, spiking up to 40%, on media content and video playback. Strange, since I did re-install flash before I posted this thread (but didn't feel the need to restart the computer, only the browser).

Some update must have caused the issue.

I agree with you Harrision about flash's cross platform nature and lack of dedicated and optimized hardware acceleration, I did mention it a few times above.

I still find it strange however how it uses the same CPU power to play a compressed flv file as it does to move around and scale a few images (about 3000MIPS!!! on peak average). It could really do with being optimized better since it's now a standard internet format.

Many emulators take less resources than flash!