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Snow-i · Nov 1, 2010, 06:59 PM

My aluminum macbook has been acting up recently. Running slow, beachballing, all the symptoms of low memory. Sure enough, my pages are off the chart.

I'm only running 2gb, but all I have open is MS word and Safari.."what gives?" I ask myself.

I'm about to plunk on 4gb when I decide to see which of the two programs was hogging the ram. Guess what it was? Flash player. 550 mb of "real mem" Thats over twice Safari and MS word combined. Thats it. I'm not dealing with it anymore. I removed the flash plugin, and now i'm not paging at all, have 1gb FREE (1.4 free/inactive) and I have mail, 7 safari tabs, itunes 10, and activity monitor open. My macbook feels new.

I'm going to try to get by without it from here on forward. Lets see how it goes.

imitchellg5 · Nov 1, 2010, 07:13 PM

Flash and Safari are always huge hogs, especially the latest releases. You really should upgrade to 4Gb of RAM though, everything will be much snappier anyway.

Spheric Harlot · Nov 1, 2010, 07:19 PM

Click2flash ftw.

Snow-i · Nov 1, 2010, 07:21 PM

Yeah, if business weren't slow I'd do it anyway.

I'm also seriously considering an SSD since I don't use that much space, 128 would probably be more than enough and I could use the current drive for time machine.

besson3c · Nov 1, 2010, 08:21 PM

Click2Flash Safari extension FTW...

Snow-i · Nov 1, 2010, 10:53 PM

Okay,

I reinstalled flash and promptly installed click2flash. So far, I'm really liking it. I'm not sure why I didn't do this years ago - I always in the "flash sucks but not that much" camp and after realizing how it brought my computer to a crawl I'm now firmly in the "flash sucks and needs to die" camp.

besson3c · Nov 1, 2010, 11:09 PM

Originally Posted by Snow-i

Okay,

I reinstalled flash and promptly installed click2flash. So far, I'm really liking it. I'm not sure why I didn't do this years ago - I always in the "flash sucks but not that much" camp and after realizing how it brought my computer to a crawl I'm now firmly in the "flash sucks and needs to die" camp.

It sucks less under Windows, have you used it there?

Spheric Harlot · Nov 2, 2010, 02:17 AM

How is that relevant to his experience?

besson3c · Nov 2, 2010, 02:46 AM

Because that may have shaped his "Flash sucks but not that much" impression if he used it there primarily and assumed that it was pretty much identical on both platforms.

Spheric Harlot · Nov 2, 2010, 02:59 AM

How is that relevant to his experience?

The Internet royally sucks on his machine when Flash is switched on, and when Click2Flash is installed, it sucks an order of magnitude less.

Why does it matter that somewhere exists a set of machines where it sucks less? The implication is that he has the wrong kind of machine, rather than that the Flash developers ****ed up. I suppose that's a matter of perspective, but thankfully, the dynamic has shifted:
I generate THEIR market position, rather than their market share determining my course of action.

Welcome to Apple, where, if something sucks, it's not the user's fault.

besson3c · Nov 2, 2010, 03:20 AM

Ummm... okay, whatever.

Snow-i · Nov 2, 2010, 04:40 AM

Yeah,

I've used it on just about every system you can name.

"Sucks less" still sucks.

besson3c · Nov 2, 2010, 04:48 AM

Originally Posted by Snow-i

Yeah,

I've used it on just about every system you can name.

"Sucks less" still sucks.

Agreed, it's not like I'm a fan of it, I just suspect that it gets complained about a little less on the Windows side in part because some/all video is GPU accelerated there.

Spheric Harlot · Nov 2, 2010, 05:05 AM

It is on the Mac side, as well.

Since 10.1, released this summer.

Still sucks, apparently.

besson3c · Nov 2, 2010, 05:20 AM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

It is on the Mac side, as well.

Since 10.1, released this summer.

Still sucks, apparently.

For H.264 video only, but doesn't the Windows version also accelerate the native Flash video format?

P · 06:15 AM

Originally Posted by besson3c

For H.264 video only, but doesn't the Windows version also accelerate the native Flash video format?

Adobe doesn't claim that it does - they specifically mention H.264 acceleration. The older Flash format is H.263 or VP6 (they've used both), which no GPU manufacturer claims to support. Both nVidia and ATi officially support MPEG1. MPEG2, H.264, VC-1 and (lately, in the case of nVidia) MPEG4 ASP. A fundamental part of MPEG1/MPEG2 decoding is the inverse discrete cosine transform. That is a rather basic feature that many video formats use, so any iDCT acceleration might be used by VP6 or H.263 as well, but there is zero indication that Adobe does that on any platform.

Currently, the only acceleration support available on the Mac is H.264 on nVidia GPUs 9400M and 320M. I am not aware of the details there, if you can use only the iDCT features for instance, but then with a modern Mac CPU, you might not need to. You could MPEG4 ASP on a 233 MHz Pentium II and DVDs (MPEG2) before that, and even an Atom 1.6 GHz is more than capable of handling that sort of load.

angelmb · Nov 2, 2010, 10:11 AM

imitchellg5 · Nov 2, 2010, 10:22 AM

Originally Posted by Spheric Harlot

It is on the Mac side, as well.

Since 10.1, released this summer.

Still sucks, apparently.

10.1 is even worse for me in Windows 7, I've caught it using ~160% CPU several times. In OS X it never seems to go above 80% for me. Before, it used to be vice versa.

Snow-i · Nov 2, 2010, 10:27 AM

I've always had a custom PC box around. Self built conroe 2.4 with 4 gigs and an x800 XL. I mainly use it for misc stuff and as a night table for my macbook

. My main office machine is a powermac g5 dualcore that I was given as a "bonus" (they were donating them because of a move to all mac pros) during a contract over the summer. I don't really do alot on those machines as far as web surfing or anything to do with flash - my macbook stays by my side for that sort of stuff. I only bother having Office on the macbooks - as a result I didn't pay much attention to exactly how much flash was tying up my resources.

I've developed a healthy dislike for all things Adobe this past year after having to support CS3, CS4, and CS5. What a pain in my ass but at least it gave me some work.

I'm really thinking of selling the G5 and getting an SSD for my macbook. If the macbook had to take my total workload I'd max out the ram. I'd really miss having two 20 inch screens though - I'd have a much faster machine overall and I'd probably go back to not really caring much about flash - though click2flash isn't going anywhere on any of my machines

.