Thread: Flash Player Lags

Vista-2GB ram

Basically, whenever I'm using some sort of Flash based program on the internet, such as Flash games or Youtube, it lags. This isn't due to my system specs because for one, it didn't use to do this, and two, my brother has the exact same computer without this problem. When it lags, it isn't continuous or connected to things like 'how many objects are on the screen'. It has a random amount of time (1-20 seconds) of perfect smoothness, then another random amount of time lagging. I'd say that it lags to about 1/3 of the original speed.

I've tried Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Google Chrome, and they all produce this lagging. I've reinstalled Flash Player and that didn't fix it. Restarting my computer didn't do the trick either. In my processes window, nothing except the browser is taking up a substantial amount of memory or CPU. I've made sure to close out of other applications and taskbar items just to make sure.

This is becoming an increasingly annoying problem, mostly because I'm a Flash developer. If I want to test games online or anything like that, it becomes hard to impossible. My standalone Flash player, however, does not lag.

It's not my internet speed, I know that for sure. Videos stream incredibly fast and pages load pretty much instantly. I get up to 600kb/s sometimes on downloads.

Anyone know what's wrong?

Flash Player != Flash Plugin. Reinstall the plugin.

You say you have Firefox, do you have Firebug installed? That might help you search for the problem.

Well I guess I've been reinstalling Flash Plugin then. http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ If this isn't what you mean, what do you mean? Also, I installed Firebug but I'm not exactly sure what to do with it .

Open the error console in Firebug, perhaps the flash plugin is throwing errors.

Is it possible that you have multiple flash players rendering the same thing? Open your process tree and be sure that Quicktime or Real Player isn't running behind the scenes. Trying to render the flash with two different programs at once would certainly cause a lag.

Nope, I'm just rendering it in my browser (Firefox at the moment). And how do I check if the flash plugin is giving errors?

Also, here's a CPU graph of Firefox while playing "Use Boxmen" on Onemorelevel.com:


The sudden drops in CPU usage is where it suddenly isn't laggy, and as you can see, they're very short compared to when it does lag.

What I meant is it might be possible that the last time you updated quicktime or something, it hijacked the flash rendering. Maybe your browser is trying to use both quicktime and flash at the same time. Do a ctrl+alt+del and look at the processes.