1292931 - Poor Flash Performance : System Resources are not being used

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[helloBugs23]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; Win64; x64; rv:43.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/43.0
Build ID: 20151216175450

Steps to reproduce:

Firefox Version: 43.0.1 (Although updating did not cause this issue it has existed for about a year)
Flash Version: 22.0.0.209 (Issue also existed on past flash versions)

Play a flash online game. In this case I am playing Pawn Tactics hosted by https://www.sandboxd.com/

Enter a larger map or play with many players.

Steps:

1) Play Pawn Tactics
2) Enter the Death Trap Capture the Flag map with at least 1 other player.
 


Actual results:

I had 5/30FPS, and firefox was not utilizing my system resources to its best ability.

http://i.imgur.com/fjJN72D.png
http://i.imgur.com/ScvbBUg.png

As shown in the screenshots, my FPS is poor, plugin container for flash is using about 2% cpu and the gpu is not a bottleneck either. The second screenshot shows that my CPU has 8 threads. 

The flash game is single threaded, therefore the flash plugin should theoretically have access to up to 12.5% of my CPU in total.

-> How did I come up with 12.5% max cpu usage for the flash plugin? Because the flash game is single threaded, it can only use 1 CPU thread at any point. My CPU has 8 threads. 100% cpu usage is all 8 threads being used completely. 100 / 8 = 12.5 ; 12.5% cpu usage is 1 thread being used completely.




Expected results:

Here is a screenshot of the game running on Internet Explorer. 

http://i.imgur.com/aGdUBmG.png

It runs on full FPS. People specifically myself included tend to resort to Chrome to play this game because firefox fails to allocate enough system resources for the framerate to be good.

In order to continue to limit the amount of resources flash advertisements get, I propose firefox adds an enabled by default option "limit flash plugin resources", that can be switched off to allow flash to utilize full system resources.

I understand firefox used to be pointed fingers at for flash using 100% cpu usage, but we can't just solve problems for people on weak systems by limiting the resources it uses and introduce problems on systems with sufficient resources. 

Off-Topic: Not sure why Firefox decided to use 6% GPU usage when the window wasnt even active, must be another bug P:

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

This is not intentional. Either Flash or Firefox is deciding not to use the accelerated rendering pipeline and so you're getting the old bitmap graphics pipeline. You can look in about:support to see whether Firefox is using accelerated rendering (and if not, some detail about why not).

There is a Flash change in the works that may make this better, scheduled to come out in the next few months. Apart from that, though, this is not going to be a priority for our team, since we're focused on the transition away from Flash.

Comment 2

[helloBugs23]

You think this is because of misconfigured hardware acceleration?

Comment 3

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I think that's the most likely explanation, yes.

Comment 4

[helloBugs23]

Direct2D Enabled	true
DirectWrite Enabled	true (6.2.9200.17568)
GPU Accelerated Windows	4/4 Direct3D 11 (OMTC)

But shouldn't it be a firefox issue if the flash performance is poor out of the box? (Maybe I misunderstand the "RESOLVED" status tag.)

Would you like to suggest different settings I can try?

Comment 5

[helloBugs23]

Turning off "Use hardware acceleration when available" in firefox settings made no difference.

Comment 6

[Benjamin Smedberg]

"RESOLVED INCOMPLETE" means that we aren't going to assign engineers to this specific problem. I believe that either the new Flash 23 feature will fix this, or you need to file it with Adobe.

Comment 7

[helloBugs23]

I knew it was off because:

DirectWrite Enabled	false (6.2.9200.17568)
GPU Accelerated Windows	0/1 Basic (OMTC)
Supports Hardware H264 Decoding	No; Hardware video decoding disabled or blacklisted

(Previously the H264 decoding was also enabled.) 

I wish I could edit my posts. Sorry for multiple posting.

Okay so, perhaps the NPAPI plugin is faulty? I'll try to raise an issue with adobe then, thanks.

Comment 8

[helloBugs23]

You are absolutely correct. This is an issue with the NPAPI plugin by Adobe. I just tested using Opera 28.0 to see if I could replicate the behaviour and Alas! There it is. 

http://i.imgur.com/jJ4l13m.png

Comment 9

[helloBugs23]

I tried to install Flash Player 23 Beta and the issue persists.
http://i.imgur.com/t5hfbfx.png

The worser part about this is that it's a bit random. I did not add that in fear that my bug would be disqualified as re-produceable. Sometimes the NPAPI plugin will actually behave correctly such as almost all day yesterday, and for 5 minutes just now, however it's back to its low FPS at this point.

When it does run at the right speed, the cpu usage isn't really greater in the plugin container than when it's running slow.

Maybe the plugin's named NPSWF because it's PNSFW (probably not safe for work :P)

Comment 10

[helloBugs23]

Created a bug report on Adobe.

https://bugbase.adobe.com/index.cfm?event=selectBug&CFGRIDKEY=4186147

Thanks for your support and help Mozilla.