Flash player causing high CPU usage %, Windows 10 Pro 64-bit

[Guest]

Hey,

About week ago I build new PC and did clean Windows 10 install from .ISO. One day while I was gaming my FPS went from 100+ to ~20 so I tracked down causing the issue. In one of the browser tabs had just started livestream on Twitch, utilizing Flash Player. CPU usage % was off the hook causing CPU to hit 100% and choke whole system. Funny part being that with my old PC, that was running i5 750, I didn't have this issue.

Build;

W10 Pro 64-bit, pure install / no upgrade from previous Windows

Asus Z170-A

i5 6600K @ 4,4GHz

16GB DDR4

GTX980Ti with 355.60WHQL drivers

Full DXDiag of my computer HERE

I have tried to no help;

• Enabling and disabling hardware acceleration
• Installing Flash player from Adobe website, disabling Chrome integrated one and running one installed from website
• Different browser [Chrome & FireFox]
• Contacting Adobe via Twitter, only to be told "Works fine on my PC" by rep

Pics;

Any advice to solve this CPU utilisation issue would be welcome, or am I just out of luck and have to suffer from this?

[Preran]

Am asking around for assistance with this issue. Stay tuned.

[jeromiec83223024]

Is this a Firefox only issue?  It would be useful to know if you see the same problem in Chrome, IE or Edge.  Also, is this the standard 32-bit release Firefox, or are you running something else?

[Guest]

Pictures in opening post are 2 from Chrome and 2 from FireFox. Issue is same on all three browser.

Chrome: 44.0.2403.155 m

FireFox: 40.0.2 and downloaded from Download Firefox — Free Web Browser — Mozilla so I assume it's standard 32-bit release

Here is picture of CPU usage when watching using Edge;

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

Sorry, I was just skimming forum posts earlier.  It didn't click that this was Twitch.

Long story short, Twitch could serve you video that could be offloaded to your GPU, but they don't.  They're using the old-school video object that pre-dates GPU support.  We don't really know why.  Hulu does this as well.  Moving to StageVideo seems like a win-win for Twitch and the community, and it falls back gracefully to the software experience that you're currently getting.  We'd be more than happy to talk to them about the benefits and address any concerns they might have.  We've reached out a few times, but haven't gotten any traction.

If you don't believe me, believe the video engineers at Google (see comment 10):

Issue 456421 - chromium - Flash uses beyond extreme CPU in Chrome for 720p+ streams - An open-source...

[jeromiec83223024]

Also, I'm really jealous of that guy's Fallout t-shirt collection.

[Guest]

Interesting thing to know and really makes you wonder why Twitch insist on using such inefficient methods. One reason could be that they are building and slowly rolling out their HTML5 based player?

I think I could give Livestreamer a try and see how it works; Overview — Livestreamer 1.12.2 documentation

[Nitanwar]

HI Tovarisc ,

With the scenario explained above by you,I am unable to reproduce the issue at my end .I have checked the issue on Win 10 ,Nvidia GE Force GTX 650 on Chrome 44.0.2403.155 and Firefox 40.0 with flash player version 18.0.0.232 ,but the CPU usage never shoot up ,as shown by you in the snapshot .

I need few information from your side :-

1) Flash player version .

2) Streaming application you are using for broadcasting .

Also ,it would be very helpful if you can share a video ,with steps reproducing the issue with me ( email id :nitanwar [@] [adobe] com) .

[Guest]

1) Adobe Flash Player 18.0.0232 / Twitch Player 1.6.1

2) For broadcasting? I don't broadcast anything, I just watch Twitch

3) Steps to reproduce the issue: Open browser of your choice [e.g. Chrome] and go to Twitch.tv and open any live broadcast

[jeromiec83223024]

Unfortunately, I provided the correct answer.  Twich doesn't use StageVideo, so we can't leverage your GPU when playing video, and 25-30% CPU decoding an H.264 video in software isn't unreasonable.

[Guest]

What Twitch staff member had to say on this topic;

"We pushed out a A/B test with StageVideo around a year and a half ago. The flash/driver incompatibility issues uncovered were extensive, and we had to roll it back due to a non-negligible percentage of viewers in the test group who could no longer watch video due to frame flickering. Communication with other organizations that had tried (and then avoided) StageVideo made it clear these issues were not isolated, and a followup discussion with the Chrome team reinforced that position. We understand that both the Adobe and Chrome teams have made substantial improvements since that time, and are interested in trying to move toward StageVideo again. Even when the full HTML 5 player is released, a number of older browsers will still have to use the Flash due to a lack of HTML 5 support, and supporting that group of viewers will remain important."

Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Twitch/comments/3oczc1/twitchtv_streams_hogging_a_lots_of_cpu_asked/cvw73ra

[jeromiec83223024]

Yep, that sounds accurate.  They've chosen to avoid hardware acceleration in order to ensure maximum compatibility.  That choice comes with trade-offs.  In this case, it's a significantly greater amount of CPU time required to decode the video stream in software.

[Guest]

How much has StageVideo improved since their test 1,5 years ago? Fault isn't all on Twitch.tv if StageVideo as tech cause a lots compatibility issues when dealing with wide variety of users [newer and older tech]. Not first time users of newer tech have to suffer.

[jeromiec83223024]

If only it were that simple.  The issue isn't StageVideo itself, it's the state of drivers and hardware in the market.  Since Flash rolls out to 98% of the internet, including machines from the 90's running WinXP SP2, we exposed a large number of latent issues in existing hardware.  We worked closely with most of the major manufacturers to report issues over the years, and by and large, they've issued updates to resolve them.  Whether people pick up the driver updates (particularly on trailing-edge systems) is a whole other problem, so there's always this baseline of problem hardware in the mix.

The big initial motivation for hardware acceleration was the netbook market, which at the time, was targeting really low-end CPUs (for price point and power consumption) that couldn't do native H.264 video decoding in software with any reasonable kind of performance.  You *have* to have hardware acceleration on those devices.  It's been a few years, and now both Flash and the browser are both leveraging hardware acceleration, and more and more, decisions about blacklisting hardware are happening at the browser level.

So content providers ultimately have a choice.  Universal compatibility, where everything is in our sphere of control and done in software ( at the expense of battery life and/or performance), or we can go for speed.  In that instance, we hand everything off to the hardware, at which point we're totally dependent on the drivers and silicon to do the processing. 

At Flash Player scale (current rough estimates are ~2.5 billion desktops, or 98% of internet connected computers), you're dealing with the messiness of the real world.  Because leveraging hardware inherently depends on more things going correctly (like the user applying updates to the machine after they unboxed it back in 2003), there's always going to be a small, but non-zero baseline of GPU-related headache. 

The vast majority of those problems are resolved with some basic advice (https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/video-playback-issues.html), but if you're a content provider that doesn't want that support headache, the software-only approach is understandably attractive.  Now, as display resolutions go up and people are pumping more pixels through the video stream, there's going to be an upper limit on how well the existing codecs work in software as well.

On the plus side, now that the browsers are also leveraging hardware acceleration, it's much harder as a GPU vendor or OEM to miss the kinds of driver bugs we see in hardware in the field when shipping new shipping products.  So some of this is a waiting game, but we also know that people hold on to hardware for a lot longer than the industry would probably like, particularly in the developing world.