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Comment by twir | Hacker News Reader

I didn't see anything in that post that disproved that Flash is a CPU hog.

I work with Flash and AIR apps on a daily basis, and I can tell you that invariably by the end of the day my browser's Flash plugin is using the majority of my CPU time and RAM.

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The point is, CPU hog compared to what?

If it's using the majority of the CPU and memory, then the answer apparently is "compared to everything else".

Exactly. If it's hogging the CPU, it's hogging the CPU--it's irrelevant if it's more or less a hog than something else really.

Truth be told, I'm only running a Mac Mini. That being said, iTunes seems to be more efficient at streaming audio, video. Other desktop applications seem to do a better job at graphics in general.

I guess part of the performance hit one experiences with Flash is due to the overhead of a nice cross-browser, cross-platform, web-oriented runtime. Java applets, which do more or less the same thing, are also pitifully sluggish, in my experience.

It's more than relevant whether something hogs a CPU compared to another program that does an equivalent thing. No one complains when Crysis hogs the CPU, because we all expect 3d games to hog the CPU. People complain when Flash hogs the CPU, but seem to forget that HTML5/JS apps that do equivalent things often hog the CPU just as much, if not more. That is the relevance.

Good point. I guess it does depend on context and the purpose of the app.

Except if you'd read the article you'd know that when running HTML5 things (apps?) that do similar things to Flash, the CPU gets a similar hit as to when Flash does it. This is the point of the article: multimedia web content along the lines of what flash does (excepting video playback) is by its nature something that utilizes significant CPU power. You can't have your cake and eat it too.

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