I too have seen an excessive amount of memory leaked by this version. I have 2gb of Ram, and flash uses 450mb on a single tab in firefox. The 11.2 plugin rarely exceeded 200mb. The facebook application is hidden chronicals. It is true that when I close the tab, the memory is released to the system. However, it is next to impossible to play the game when flash uses this much ram.

My system overhead uses 38% ram (778mb)

Add this to Firefofox with 1 tab on hidden chronicals uses between 8-9% ram (170mb)

Flash plugin uses 22% ram (450mb and climbing)

I downloaded a 3rd party memory cleaner, and set the program to purge the memory when it reaches 65% in use. This causes flash to purge 2/3 of its leaked memory. At this point the system becomes usable again!

Seeing as this is an ongoing, and unresolved issue with Flash, it is my recomendation to add a configurable option that limits the amount of ram the plugin uses. Add this tab to the global settings so the end users can better manage their pc's memory.

If you need to see a working example, I would be willing to do a webex with adobe's support.

What's sad is that I got a Flash Update yesterday, but it doesn't tell you it's for the Flash Plugin. So I updated and now I'm stuck with the latest Flash 11.3.300.270.

I wanted to go back to 11.2 plug in but it seems to have been pulled from sites like FileHippo.

Also find it funny that 11.3.300.270 was given to us as an update, but yet Adobe site itself still lists .268 as the latest build. What gives?

Thank you for the explanation Chris.

I sure hope this update solves some issues.

I play games on FB, usually using FF, but 1 of the games (Treasure Island) I'm having to use Chrome because the graphics are messed up on FF.

Chris et'al,

I see at least three different issues here:

1. People seeing other graphics (e.g. Video, TV, games etc) performance significantly decreasing when Flash is active.
2. People see significant increase in memory usage in 11.3 and 11.4
3. People see sluggy/sticky overall performance when Flashu is running heavy apps.

Here are my finding this far:

Case 1: Decreased overall performance when Flash or any other UVD application is running

• If you're running AMD/ATI Radeon series graphics, you're likely seeing the symptoms of Radeon series GPU BIOS/firmware "feature" which happens with _every_ application using the UVD ("Univeral Video Decoder"). I call this bug even some resist it, as this feature causes the GPU core clock and memory speed to drop to about half (depending on GPU model). I managed to isolate this problem only week or two ago, and since the firmware patch I did, these sympotms have _all_ disapearred. See end of this message if you need more detailed explanation how to fix this problem.
  
• This problem can't be fixed with driver update (now or never) as it is a GPU BIOS issue. I have asked AMD if they plan to provide a generic patch for this but I haven't received any answer yet.
• If you are running NVIDIA and you see similar behaviour, make sure that you're running the most recent drivers.

Case 2: Increaseed use of memory

• I can confirm that 11.3 and especially 11.4 uses significanlt more memory than older versions.
• This is not correlating with Protected Mode Enabled/Disabled. Aka in both modes there are some excess memory usage cases.
  
• For example in 4GB system the memory usage varied in between 20-25%, and in my test with other application cases, 25% launched some serious random "hard fault sessions" trying to maintain the balance in between Free/Standby/Modified lists. Espacially when the paging started, as you can guess when modified list was needed by other applications, the reponse times were from h*ll.
• IMHO: It seems like Flash is trying to do some sophisticated working set trimming, which is always a good intention. I'd still recommend taking a more detailed look to that, and possibly provide some user level parameters to help me to decide how much memory I wish to allow for Flash application(s).

Case 3: Flash 11.3 and 11.4 delivering reduced overall browser performance

• This has been a real bugger and I just don't have more time to look at it. Anyway, this is not directly connected to Case #2. I verified this with different CPU and memory configurations thus at least to me #2 and #3 are separate issues -- even though there might be a common root cause behind them, I have no evidence for that now.
• The problem description roughly is following: The Firefox windows/tabs respond slowly to any attempted controls. If FF is at the background, it may take 10s of seconds, in some cases even 2-3 minutes to respond to request and come to top and activate any controls. All requests using any user controls such as scrolling or opening new tab or anything similar is responding very slowly.
• Even though the documentation claims that the threads are runnin low priority, they are definitely blocking user level activity. I wonder if somekind of resource, locking or IPC related conflict has this effect to user basic priority levels as well.
• Interesting finding was that when I funneled Flash related threads to two dedicated cores (2 of 4), the overall performance seen by user improved. See above.
  
• In this case I will expect to Adobe team put some more effort to verifying where the problem might be.
• Interesting finding here is that both Waterfox and Firefox with Protected Mode disabled deliver significantly better performance that does not have an impact to case #2 or #1 at all aka the memory consumtion and video performance problems with other problems are another issue here.

I'll test later today the most recent beta [Checked: No Beta versions available].

For Case1: See further details in http://techlogon.com/2011/08/11/shockwave-flash-crashes-in-google-chro me/

Cheers,

//J

Hi,

Sorry for restarting this but I am seeing spikes in excess of 1million K for one of the flashplayer plugins when I am on duelingnetwork.com, this is a recent issue on the most recent flash player 11.5.something and I am on Firefox 17.0, using windows 7 64-bit.

On google chrome one of the google chrome proccesses climbs up steadily until it reaches around the million mark and it crashes (Flashplayer, google chrome insists). Is this a flash player problem or the problem of the website, once again though this is a recent issue.

Please and thank you

P.s In the time taken to write this post (wth dueling network idle in the background) flashplayer has climed from 93000k to 211000k

I have firfox 17 and 11.5 and the cpu usage and ram sloooooooooooooooows things up so much on any flash app, you tube, google earth in fact any app that uses flash! Noticed recently player cityville on facebook the cpu hit 70% usage and RAM free fell to 450Mb on a 3Gb system memory!

Message was edited by: floobydog

I have to agree that ever since flash added control panel from  11.0 onwards it has been a completel shamble. What you fail to understand is the average people using the internet doesn't have a clue about in detail technical support or how don't want to spend long hours trying to go through trial and error technical support any as all they are getting is frustration and no one to listen to what is really ahppening.

Let me try to explain this to you Jeromie Clark , the previous version of flash before version 11.0 was working more than marvellous for everyone it blend welll no need to give a damn about control panel or memory usage all they cared was they go on youtube or any channel first time and it ask them to download flah and they did and that is the last personal contact they had with their flash player so brilliant it waas.

Please pass this message to your board, since everyone rely on flash to watch videos and music on internet, the changes they made to flash after version 11 has all been BIG mistakes one after the other and they keep going in the that same direction again and again making more people frustratng everyday. If your people were actually listening then they would have understand that they are moving in the wrong direction and revert to how it was before.

The issue people are trying to explain to you is , while watching one video online it is not dependent on the site or channel, most user is having an issue where flash suddenly eat all the ram exceeding the amount of ram the browser itself is using up until it render the browser itself  NON-RESPONDING undefinitely which a lot of people has been trying to make you the developpers understand. If you are unable to accept the fact that there is a problem with it and try to revert to how flash was before then the issues and complain will only keep piling up because 90% of sites uses flash and it is causing massive frustration right now between browser developpers and users about the use of flashplayer.

I have given up on what in my opinion is a fine piece of crap by that I mean every flash player after version 11.0 I will ask of you if there is a way where I can have a non control panel flash player version 9. or 10 I can download and use I am really fed up with this situation everyday where I have to CTRL+ ALT+ DEL  then end process from my task manager when my flash player go berserk this should give you an idea how frustrating it is. If you are looking into individual site then you have to go through all video sites then effect is the same. We pay a premium to watch a movie channel and halfway through the movie it stop responding because flash decided to go berserk  and suck all the memory page stop responding we have to CTRL+ALT + Del again then you don't want to watch the movie anymore plain simple this is the experience of a lot of user right now please pass this to your developpers if you can.

Guys,

I've found a trick to the memory hogging problem that I'd like to share with everyone having this memory problem - temporary solution of course, but it worked for me. (still don't know what the root cause really is ... )

First of all , I had this problem on a Windows 8 computer .. with everything being the latest and greatest.  Memory usage started to grow  in all browsers (IE, FireFox and Chrome) because I had upgraded to the latest and greatest Adobe FLash ... can't remember which version I had before that.  Well you know what happened next .. i'll spare you the sad story and skip to what I did to fix it.

Windows 7 / 8 users:

First , start up task manager . Click on the 'Processes' tab, then sort by Memory Usage by clicking on the Mem Usage Column header. Make sure you've sorted it by Highest to lowest.  We are doing this to find the browser process which is using flash . It will show up at the top and you'll see it growing to about 1.7 - 1.9 GB memory  usage. Don't let it grow beyond 50% of your total RAM .. system may get slow or unusable at that point.

Now start up your favorite browser and go to a page that has flash .. youtube for example. You'll immediately see the memory usage counter start climbing and the process will be a tthe top you your list in taskmanager (assuming you've sorted it correctly). The process should be the browser you are using. Right click on that top line and 'End Process'.

You'll see that the browser window goes away - Browser (chrome/IE) will automatically reload the window with your flash content and continue playing from where it left off. The memory will start to grow again on the browser process.  Keep killing it .. for a total of 3 times (have never seen it go beyond 3, but hey ...you never know) .

You'll notice that after your 3rd kill , the browser continues to reload the content, but the memory usage stops growing.

Whatever crappy code was used is obviously trying to do something, but thankfully it stops doing it after the 3rd try.

You can now enjoy your flash content .. for the time being..

NOTE: if you close all your browser windows  or reboot your computer you have to do this all over again .. SORYY.. not a permanent fix. ( Rinse and Repeat !!! )

For those of you who are tired of the new version and want to go back to an earlier one that works -- here's a link to the older version in Adobe's archive : http://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/archived-flash-player-versions. html . Try it is all I can say.  

I permanently fix the problem I was having by trashing windows 8  and reinstalling from backup my WORKING COPY of windows 7. The adobe flash version in it is "You have version 11,5,31,139 installed"  . I'm not upgrading it ever again until Adobe developpers wise up and fix whatever the issue is. I'm running same hardware , just different OS now. I think it has something  to do with Windows 8. No one else has posted which OS they are running , so I"m not sure if everyone having this issues is a Windows 8 user.

For those of you who have this issue - I've felt your pain ... hope this helps.

Peace !!

Message was edited by: adobe_user875