Flash player using over 2GB.. crashing/lag issues for YEARS in 3 different browsers

[zurcdilch]

I could have as little as 6-10 tabs active with 2-3 light essential addons in either Chrome or Firefox and while watching a video with flash, my computer lags, locks up, audio/video skip frequently, memory usage is obscene (2+ GB in 2 hours usage, have to close the browser and reopen at that point)... I update my browser and extensions frequently, and whenever there is an adobe update.  I also get various other crashing issues ie: heavy frame rate drops watching a pre-buffered video (no internet issues), windows crash message for adobe flash player after exiting Firefox once flash player memory usage is over 1GB (indicating rampant memory leak issues).

Issues like these have honestly been happening for at least five years now, all related to Adobe Flash Player.  It's only getting worse now with more embedded ads everywhere on every site.  And using something like an ad blocker causes its own kind of lag and freezing

How is it possible that flash has been so terrible for so long without having the basic quality of life issues fixed yet ???  Can't wait until this dinosaur is gone.

Even this website is poorly designed.  Clicking start a new discussion at the top of the forum main page does nothing but refresh the page.  And I'm forced to search manually in this thread creation post, for a community for this post to be on?  Why?  Why can't it just be in the forum where I created the post from?  I use the search terms: Flash, Help, no communities like these show up? Is this intentional obfuscation to steer negative posters away ?

[jeromiec83223024]

Thanks for the feedback.

For your convenience, I've provided a link to the uninstaller below.

Uninstall Flash Player - Windows:

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/uninstall-flash-player-windows.html

[pro1000]

We are website owners and our users are having the same issue. We can't ask them all to uninstall Adobe Flash. When turning off Flash in the browser the site runs ads over HTML5, and there is no such problem. Can Adobe fix this in the next release? It seems like the most harmful bug in the plugin and has been happening for years. Contact us privately. We will show you what is happening. It can't be that hard for Adobe to resolve.

[jeromiec83223024]

If you have a reproducible scenario that demonstrates the problem, please file a bug at http://bugbase.adobe.com/.  If you reply here, or shoot me a private message (just click my name) with a link to the bug, we'll have someone take a look.

In general, what we observe with some ad-insertion networks is that ads are inserted but never freed, such that those objects are never available for garbage collection.

We also provide a profiling tool called Adobe Scout that will help you to identify where memory is used in your Flash content, and make changes accordingly.  In the instance that there is truly a memory leak in the runtime itself, we'd be very interested in fixing it; however, the general pattern that we observe in these kinds of issues is that it generally comes down to content.

[jeromiec83223024]

I received a private message with the URL, but here's the analysis.  I also posted it in the public bug that you referenced.

What I see when I look at your site, is that you have a large number of syndicated ad assets embedded in the page.  It's common for ad insertion content to detect the presence of Flash Player and operate differently (select from different pools of ads, use different methodologies for loading ads in the first place, etc). 

In the case of your site, there are a large number of embedded ads, and a repeating set of requests that happen constantly in a loop.  In the span of a couple minutes, I observed the page request > 2100 assets, many of which were SWFs -- primarily shims that then load individual ad assets. 

What appears to be happening is that the SWFs are continually added to the DOM, but never removed, so you're continuously stacking up large numbers of ads in the browser, which are just pushed behind the current ad that's loaded.

There's a ton of javascript in play, and the task of debugging other people's javascript is beyond the scope of what I'm prepared to do in triaging this issue, but it's clear what's happening from watching the behavior in the developer console over time.

This is ultimately a case of badly behaving content.  Either one of the included javascript libraries, or ad-loading shim SWFs is loading a ton of content and not freeing anything.  Flash Player is effectively a language runtime, and we have no good way to differentiate good loads from bad at a generic language level in a way that would keep all Flash content working.

What I'd recommend as a troubleshooting step, is reducing the number of ads on the page to one, and if you can, restricting the ads displayed to first-party ads only (e.g. doubleclick, serving only double-click ads). 

Observe the behavior in the developer console, and if you see no growth over time, add the next ad vendor, or change the setting to include affiliates, etc.  Work methodically, changing one setting at a time, until you can identify the configuration that causes the explosive loading behavior.  At that point, you'll need to reach out to to the ad vendor for advice or a resolution.

If someone can point to a discrete problem with an ActionScript API that's misbehaving (the engineers at the ad insertion network are best positioned to troubleshoot this), we're more than happy to fix it; however, all signs point to a problem with ad insertion, as defined by the content that you're incorporating on your site.

If you don't want to go down that road, you may also explore the possibility with the ad vendor of restricting all displayed ads to HTML5.  It's possible that they provide an option that you can use when embedding the ads.

[jeromiec83223024]

For completeness, my strong suspicion, based on numerous similar investigations, is that this is going to come down to a problem with an asset embedded from an small player in the affiliate ad network space.