Not happy with flash performance. All browsers.

R

rawhead

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Mint 14 : Not happy with flash performance. All browsers.

Hi folks.
New to Linux. (and the forum)
Only ever used Microsoft on PCs (OK, CP/M 30 years ago :-O )

I was getting poor flash performance in Windows 7 on my Acer REVO 3610 (2 meg)

I have now installed Mint 14 (64 bit)
When watching the football stream in firefox (or chrome/chromium/opera) as the camera pans right or left the video frequently shears horizontally, it is watchable just not as good as my windows 7 amd quad core desktop.

Youtube is superb, as is full HD AVIs via XBMC. (liking XBMC!) Also have 5.1 audio pumping out without issue.

I eventually managed to upgrade flash to the latest version from the adobe website. (The version I had installed ended with 280, the one I have installed now ends with 285)

This made little difference...

Is there anything I can do to improve the performance or is this as good as it gets?
 


Adobe's Flash plugin has some serious performance issues, especially when CPU frequency scaling is used. There seems to be a policy not to use the whole CPU workload, so the frequency scaling governor does not clock the CPU any higher. To work around this issue, see

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Cpufrequtils#Changing_the_ondemand_governor.27s_threshold

http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/poor-video-quality-flash-player.html

That particular desktop is designed for Flash 10.1 video, and runs an Atom CPU. Not the best for Flash video. Combine with the horrible performance of Flash anyway and the fact that Flash should be replaced with HTML5 and I think you are at your limits. Also notice that Chromium and Firefox use Adobe FLash (Chromium can use other flash if told to) which is stuck at version 11.2 while Chrome uses Google Pepperflash. It is kept up to date.
 
Thanks Ryan.... :)
Plenty to play with when I get back from my hols....

Cheers
Jon
 
Yes. And I have no idea why Mint does this.

Open Synaptic. Click the "Search" button and do a search for flash.

Remove the default Flash software (right-click and "Mark for Complete Removal") and replace it with flashplugin-installer (right-click and "Mark for Installation).

Click the big "Apply" button at the top. Remove and install the software.

Enjoy!
 
I'm using Mint15 with KDE and just did an upgrade. A new flash and Firefox 26 are now available via its repositories. These should help with your performance issues.
After installing Mint15, hit Ctrl-Alt-F2 to reach a console

Log in with command line, using your UserName and Password

Once prompt changes, either login as root or
Code:
sudo su
enter Password again, then
Code:
apt-get update
then
Code:
apt-get upgrade
Once all has been upgraded, reboot with
Code:
init 6
Proceed to login with GUI and see if performance in not improved.

Best wishes!
 
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flash is horrible and needs to die as soon as possible...

But, the problem you refer to however may not be related to flash at all, but plain and simple video tearing, caused by the VGA driver rendering faster than the screen. You may need to install the nvidia blob driver to get decent performance without tearing. If you're running a display compositor, ensure that sync to vblank is enabled.

To see which kernel driver is in use:
Code:
$ lspci -k | grep -iA2 vga

Code:
sudo su
Just a quick note: you shouldn't need to do this, in fact it's just a crude way of doing:
Code:
$ sudo -s
This will give you a log in shell which you can just 'exit' from when done.
 
I didn't spot that... alug_Doc is the necromancer...

Oh well, never mind, it might be useful to someone...
 
I didn't spot that... alug_Doc is the necromancer...

Oh well, never mind, it might be useful to someone...

Absolutely correct on both counts.

Google does an excellent job of cataloging forums. For example, my LUG has a forum. For the month of December 2013, the most users online at one time was 14. Yet we had 32,388 page views. The majority were non-members searching the Web for answers.

This site has an excellent score. And gets more traffic than my LUG's site, I'm sure.

For every person who posts a question on a forum, you can be certain that a multitude of other users are experiencing the same or similar problem. They just want an answer. And I want them to get the most out Linux.

So if I come across a post that needs an answer, I'll try to help.
 
Last edited:

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