Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends. | Hacker News Reader

Flash Player: CPU Hog or Hot Tamale? It Depends.

streaminglearningcenter.com

17 pointsprakash12 comments

This ducks the real issue.

I'm not all that concerned about the efficiency of the codec and of the mechanism that flushes video to the screen. That said, <video> in a web browser that's codesigned to work on a platform is always going to give a complex cross-platform app like Flash a run for the money.

I'm more concerned that Flash burns up CPU for no reason at all. I mean, my Mac Mini hits 100% CPU and sounds like a helicopter taking off when I've got a little tiny flash ad open on any tab. I got no trouble w/ internet ads, but it's ridiculous that one stupid ad should be able to completely disable the power management system on my computer.

Exactly. The article says that Flash isn't inherently slow. Is anything inherently slow if you take time to optimize it? Why has Adobe/Macromedia taken so long to get decent performance out of Flash?

I'd say the ball is in Adobe's court to actually make a version of Flash that doesn't suck on the existing platforms.

Because its easier, in a cross platform sense, to code to one device: the cpu. Graphics libraries, GPUs, and drivers are more different and thus require more knowledge, experience, debugging, etc.

The performance of flash is good enough for Adobe. It's not good enough for apple and, well, some of us. Steve Jobs called them lazy, precisely because they don't make more effort in this department.

The post spends a lot of time talking about flash not utilizing / partially utilizing / fully utilizing graphics cards and makes a lot of conclusions and even takes a dig at apple about it. But then never bothers to ask the same questions about html5. e.g., which browsers are natively using hardware acceleration for H.264, if any? Apparently the author didn't find it relevant. "I didn't contact any other companies because the tests are objective and straightforward."

If flash only beats html5 when using hardware acceleration and html5 browsers haven't introduced hardware acceleration yet, his conclusions end up backwards, or at best completely irrelevant and speculative. shrug

Steve Jobs hates flash for a lot of reasons but it is mostly because flash runs faster/better on Windows than on Mac OS. This article quantifies what people who use Mac, Windows and Linux know already: Flash is a hog outside of Windows.

I just wonder why the exact flv that makes the flashplayer in Firefox go bananas with CPU use can be played by mplayer without breaking a sweat.

http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/2010/01/solving_different...

Which, for those who haven't read it, is an Adobe employee saying that Flash is inherently slow for displaying video, and they have no intention of changing this.

Currently all the HTML5 video implementations suffer from the same issue, but I've never heard them state that they have no intention of addressing it.

It's a hog inside windows, too.

Ha. It is but I think the point is that even before GPU assistance, Flash works better in Windows than on the Mac. It makes sense for Steve Jobs to pressure Adobe into improving the Mac version. HTML5 is turning out to be the hammer that forces Adobe to innovate.

A lot of that isn't Adobe's fault though, the only browser on OSX currently supporting Core Animation (the most efficient API for drawing to the canvas) is Safari 4. Core Animation drawing has been implemented in 10.1 and at the moment my (rough) tests show it to run up to 60% faster in Safari than Chrome. Obviously still nowhere near Windows standards, but it's a great improvement.

Famous last words: "Since the comparative efficiency of x vs. y seemed easy enough to quantify, I endeavored to do so..."

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