Shockwave flash ridiculous memory usage.

Zephandrypus · 14 Mar 2016

In every single browser, flash has always been the biggest problem. I often had one or two GB of memory used up by Firefox or Chrome, even after getting a TabUnloader and having no YouTube videos open. I recently switched to Vivaldi, a power user browser, and it has a task manager that lets me see the usage of all the plugins and tabs. I took a couple screenshots of the task manager and attached them below. I'll give a few events and noticed changes in RAM usage.

1. Shockwave flash using 612 MB, GPU process using 300 MB, computer RAM usage is at 84%.
2. Ran a quick RAM clean with Advanced SystemCare; flash dropped to 50 MB and computer dropped to 72%.
3. Idled a bit while making post and shockwave rose to 300 MB, GPU dropped to 50 MB, and computer dropped to 64%.
4. Ran another RAM clean; flash dropped to 50 MB again, GPU about the same, and computer dropped to 56%.
5. Shockwave rose to 200 MB and GPU rose to 70 MB after a few more minutes of idle.
6. Ran one last RAM clean; flash dropped to 50 MB for the third time, GPU dropped to 40 MB, and computer dropped to 52%.

I think you get the point. Throughout all this, I have not changed anything in the other tabs and have not had any YouTube videos playing. Whenever I have looked online for this kind of issue, all I have found is "problems with Chrome memory leak", and some stuff about flash having a bug that's going to be "fixed" in the next update (same thing in posts 6 months or so apart).

Is there any alternative to Flash? As far as I have seen, Flash is installed, you update it occasionally, and it silently hogs your memory. No options, no configuration, no stats for nerds, etc. It doesn't seem very power-user friendly.

whs · 14 Mar 2016

Maybe here are some viable alternatives.

4 Most Amazing Alternatives To Adobe Flash Player | Transition Blog

FerchogtX · 15 Mar 2016

Honestly, GPU process needs a certain amount of RAM to work, more VRAM than RAM but you get the idea. If you watch videos that need tha fash plugin, it's almost guaranteed it will take good amounts of memory depending of the content (HD, HD@60FPS, Full HD...).

Some problems with flash in Frefox, however, can be mitigated if you disable protected mode (honestly, that thing does nothing but messing with flash performance, plugin proceses are isolated anyways from main browser)
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb...d-mode-firefox

For chrome, I dunno if this cold help mitigate the RAM usage, but you can access about:flags, and look for "Automatic tab discarding" setting, so you ca enable it and restart. See if Chrome uses less memory, seems to work for me using the portable version from time to time...

UsernameIssues · 15 Mar 2016

Zephandrypus said:

~~~
2. Ran a quick RAM clean with Advanced SystemCare; flash dropped to 50 MB and computer dropped to 72%.
~~~

If you look at RAM usage with a tool like RAMMap, you will probably find that Flash only had 50MB of RAM locked. The other ~560MB was free for other apps to use. Advanced SystemCare asked for RAM and then release it. There is rarely a good reason to free up RAM like that. Let Windows Memory management do its job.

It is best to have a small amount of free RAM:

Shockwave flash ridiculous memory usage.-ram.png

^^^ Resource Monitor ^^^

ThrashZone · 15 Mar 2016

Hi,
I haven't had flash installed in quite a long time html5 is fine to me
YouTube

I did find this pretty in tune tutorial, I wouldn't click on anything though,
How to configure your Flash Player settings for maximum privacy and security

FerchogtX · 15 Mar 2016

ThrashZone said:

Hi,
I haven't had flash installed in quite a long time html5 is fine to me
YouTube

I did find this pretty in tune tutorial, I wouldn't click on anything though,
How to configure your Flash Player settings for maximum privacy and security

Probably he uses Flash because of hardware acceleration issues... pretty more common that I would think...

@Zephandrypus : Could you please open Firefox, type about:support in adress bar, copy data to clipboard and post here. Also, close FF, open Chrome or Vivaldi, type about:gpu, copy that to clipboard and post that one too. Just to see if your system is capable of hardware acceleration.

If it does, you could get rid of flash for Youtube, even my system, that is pretty much 5 or 6 years old can play HTML5 fairly decent, I bet yours can. But post both pages from both browsers to see...