207200 - Flash plug-in eats CPU even if it is not visible.

Status: RESOLVED WORKSFORME

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Anatoly Kochergin]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.4b) Gecko/20030507

The plug-in window should not repaint itself if is not visible.
However it do.
Now when I am filling this bug report I have www.macromedia.com opened in
another tab and my CPU usage is around 25%. Even if I minimize all mozilla
windows the CPU usage will stay on that level. But if I close the tab the CPU
usage will drop to zero.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. open any site with flash animations
2. minimize all browser windows
3. see CPU usage

Actual Results:  
CPU is used

Expected Results:  
CPU is NOT used

Comment 1

[Peter Lubczynski]

What's the version of Flash that you are using? Recent Win32 Flash versions have
a fix to not eat so much CPU when not visible. You can also try changing the
"quality" to "low" to see if that helps.

Comment 2

[Anatoly Kochergin]

I have installed the last version of flash (6.0 r79). It performs quite better
(15% in the above testcase instead of 25% then minimized) but still eats CPU. 
In my opinion it is not a solution to rely on plug-in developers in this case.
Browser itself should manage plug-ins and stop unreliable ones. 
Can plug-in instance be prevented from execution by the browser?

Comment 3

[Piotr Pawlow]

I have the same problem on Linux, Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US;
rv:1.5) Gecko/20031029, Flash plugin 6.0 r79. Together with bug #224090 it makes
tabbed browsing unusable. Opening a couple of sites with flash adds makes tab
switching impossible. It is also impossible to get rid of the whole window -
close button does not work because Mozilla tries to open the message box saying
that multiple tabs are open.

Comment 4

[Christian Ehrlicher]

I've also this problems. 20% cpu usage on an 1,8GHz P4 ...
Id: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; de-AT; rv:1.5) Gecko/20031007

Maybe the OS should be changed to 'All'

Comment 5

[Jo Hermans]

*** Bug 299436 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 6

[Andrzej Figas]

I agree. All OS. Also in WindowsXP (Firefox 1.0.5)

Comment 7

[Andrzej Figas]

(In reply to comment #6)
> I agree. All OS. Also in WindowsXP (Firefox 1.0.5)

Of course 1.0.4 ;-)

Comment 8

[Jerry Baker]

Still happening in the 1.6 bits. Brings the whole system to a crawl even when the Flash is on another tab that does not have focus, and the Flash is scrolled off of that page as well.

Comment 9

[zug_treno]

*** Bug 334008 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 10

[Dan Harkless]

Note that IE does a much better job of this.  Just now, I was doing some research that required me to have several pages open simultaneously that had animated Flash ads on them, and trying to do it in Firefox (1.5.0.8) was just killing my system.  I had to reopen all the tabs in IE7 to work around Firefox's problem.  In IE, when a tab is switched away from (to one with no Flash content) or the window is minimized, CPU usage for that IE process quickly drops from 82% or whatever down to the 1% level.

This bug (or missing feature?) has really been causing my Firefox web browsing experience to be painful lately (I guess Flash ads have been getting more aggressive and CPU-hungry), even though I'm using reasonably up-to-date and powerful machines at home and at work.  I hope someone will have time to address this 3.5-year old bug.

I know it's possible to use the FlashBlock or NoScript extensions to block Flash content entirely, but as many sites use Flash for navigation and other legitimate content, I don't like the fact that those extensions don't have modes where you can allow by default and only blacklist.

Comment 11

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

dates at least to gecko 1.4

Comment 12

[Wayne Mery (:wsmwk)]

using http://uk.gamespy.com from bug 334008 as a testcase ...

1% cpu minimized, 3-4% not minimized both before and after first patch checkin of first patch for Bug 342810 (so threadmanager fix had no impact).

anyway, WFM flash r9,0,45 + 
Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1;  en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/2007060709 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre
Build identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9a6pre) Gecko/2007060809 SeaMonkey/2.0a1pre