Flash extremely high memory usage/lag

[Guest]

My browser is Google Chrome

I have Windows 7, 64-bit

Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4430 CPU @ 3.00GHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 645

8 GB Ram

Shockwave Flash 22.0 r0 (22.0.0.192)

Chrome: Version 51.0.2704.106 m (64-bit) "Google Chrome is up to date."

When I am playing simple flash games lag builds up exponentially and when I check task manager I see that chrome.exe is using up a very large amount of memory that is causing Shockwave Flash to become unresponsive. However, when I open up chrome's task manager I see that Flash is using up the most memory and it is not chrome at all. In fact, I tried to play the same games on Firefox with flash but I had the same issues.

To reproduce issue:

- Go to this link with flash enabled: Play Sky Quest, a free online game on Kongregate

- Play the first mission. If you have the problem, you will see noticeable lag halfway into the mission, or maybe even just at the menu. It varies.

Please let me know if any further information is required.

Screenshot from Chrome's task manager:

Screenshot from my desktop's task manager:

I receive this message and flash stops after a few minutes of gameplay.

[Carm01]

Google Chrome is always a memory hog. I played that and have had chrome up and running for over a day, and no problems running this.

Chrome 64 bit version

Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-6700 CPU @ 3.40GHz

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960

16 GB RAM

Even last month before I had this set up i had an old i7 860 with 8 BG ram and the 960 card I never seen any major lagging in flash player.

Try the 64 bit version of chrome.

[Guest]

If you look above you will see I am already using the 64-bit version of Chrome. It is a fault with flash, however, because it doesn't work in Firefox either.

[Carm01]

Firefox requires a different plugin

listen. so to my profile and click under MY URL

[xseven]

It is all because of GPU i guess. Just installed clean Win10 on my friends laptop, it is I5 with Intel HD graphics and when he started Coinmaster (facebook game) the RAM usage was 1.5-1.8 GB for both Chrome or Firefox, tested in both.. I have same Windows installed (fresh too) on my PC and RAM usage of Firefox was only 230-250MB for same game with nVidia GTX960 on my PC. Also the CPU usage on laptop was very high with Intel HD graphics (58 percent and 80+ with hw acceleration disabled)... I think IntelHD gpu chip does not support some functions and for that CPU must do these tasks for which it also needs RAM.

[jeromiec83223024 · Accepted solution]

Flash Player is going to use RAM.  There's a balance between performance and speed, and there's some responsibility on the application developer to free resources so that we can garbage collect them.  If the game continuously allocates objects and keeps them in use, we can't free those resources.

That said, it's also pretty common for complex games to consume a significant amount of RAM.  Where the system doesn't haven RAM available, we're going to compromise performance to stay in the constrained memory footprint by aggressively purging texture caches and things.  Garbage Collection is a CPU-intensive activity, which can cause the game to hitch, so we have heuristics that try to find opportune moments to do that.  Rendering those textures is also CPU-intensive, which is why we cache them... so you can run in less memory, but then you have to keep making things over and over, which leans harder on the CPU.

As display sizes get bigger and more dense, it's also the case that those textures and caches grow proportionately as well.  If you were to buy a comparable high-end 3D game from a commercial developer, you would see similar footprints, although there is overhead from running inside a virtual machine, inside a browser.  Nothing comes for free.

In this instance, my guess is that the memory usage wouldn't be objectionable (and shouldn't have a negative impact on the machine), if you weren't encountering the performance issue.

For the performance issue, first things first, you should make sure that Hardware Acceleration is enabled in both Flash and Chrome, and that we're able to leverage it.  There's a finite amount of GPU RAM available on your system, and we're going to fall back to software when that's exhausted.  If you're running video streams, have a million tabs open and you're playing the game, that could easily exhaust the GPU resources, making them unavailable.

If you see good performance as the single, only open tab, and then you see a big degradation in performance as you add other content in new tabs (my guess is that the game will stay fine, but we'll fall back to software on some other new tab that we open) that's what you're seeing.

If you're seeing terrible performance on just the single, only tab, then it's time to a.) make sure you have the latest available drivers for your GPU installed, then take a look at chrome://gpu to see what Chrome is doing with your hardware.  If the drivers for your hardware/OS combination are flaky, it's very likely that the Chrome team will have noticed in their aggregate stability telemetry and disabled one or more features on your GPU.  Those features then become unavailable to us as a client of that browser.  If the contents of chrome://gpu don't make sense to you, just copy and paste the contents of the whole page here.  It should give me an idea about what's up.

So, long story short, the game developer is best positioned to deal with the memory footprint in this instance.  We provide an excellent performance profiling tool called Adobe Scout, whichs allow them to identify what code is slow, and what code is consuming large amounts of memory.  If they identify something at the language level that we're doing incorrectly, we have enough detail that there's an actionable problem to tackle; however, experience says that this is highly unlikely.