# CPU usage at 100% when viewing flash content



## tr0ttl3 (Apr 14, 2009)

I am running IE 7 and firefox 3.0.8 on windows XP. Specs for my pc is: intel P4 2.8 ghz, 2 gb DDR ram, ATI radeon x1950, Power 500W. My internet connection is not an issue and i am not using wireless.
When i use any form of flash such as watching videos on youtube or playing flash games the flash content itself lags, my computer slows and CPU usage rises to 100%, iexplore.exe or firefox.exe is shown to be causing this in processes.
I have tried relentlessly searching the internet for a solution, unsuccesfully.  I have tried reinstalling flash player and i'm sure i have the latest version. I have tried reinstalling internet explorer and firefox.
I have also tried updating video drivers. I have even tried reinstalling XP and still no change. Could someone please help


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## tr0ttl3 (Apr 14, 2009)

bump


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## tr0ttl3 (Apr 14, 2009)

no one that can help


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## tr0ttl3 (Apr 14, 2009)

now i have changed my graphics card, thought it might have been the problem, but noooo.. ATI radeon hd 4650 1 GB ddr2 ram.


why does it have to be this way???


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## MikeNewman (May 21, 2004)

I'm having a similar problem, and searching the web I find quite a few discussion forums where a similar problem is described, but no solutions offered. One thing that is clear is that it does not affect everyone. I've seen threads where one person describes the problem and another with similar software environment says he does not have it.

Flash seems a common factor, even on Ubuntu with firefox, but there is something else as well.

I'm running XP professional with all the latest security patches on Dell Dimension 5100 (dual Intel processor chip 3.9 Ghz), have the problems with IE 7, FireFox and Chrome, with Norton Internet Security 2009 and see no evidence of virus or trojan infections. There are a couple of other minor problems, but they post-date occurrence of the Flash problem, and I'll post about them in a separate thread.

Some observations about it:

1. I don't see CPU above about 50%, which suggests that it is a single thread doing it.

2. One site suggested that the problem was simply that CPU usage was being misreported but that is not the case - I can tell by the speeding up of the system unit fan when processor utilisation is high over a sustained period.

3. I used to get a racket from the inbuilt disk seeking its little head off when this was happening. Last week I moved the browser cache file to an external USB disk and the seeking has stopped although I can see in Windows Task Manager that there is extensive I/O occurring (both reading and writing) in the offending process.

4. The problem does not occur consistently. I can watch several YouTube clips and a bunch of pages with Flash banner ads in them without any problems, but eventually, I hear the system unit fan speed up and check Task Manager, and yes, it's happened again.

5. The problem has been around for many months. It seems to have got progressively worse, although that may be due to increasing use of Flash by web site designers.

6. Chrome is the least worst browser to use in this circumstance. It fires up a master process with 20 or so threads and as you open other windows, a whole bunch of other processes with fewer. If you kill the master process, they all go away but if it is any of the other processes that is sucking up CPU cycles, you can kill it and all the chrome windows stay up with a message at the top of each: "The following plug-in has crashed: Shockwave Flash". Sometimes a window's contents disappears, but it returns when you refresh it and YouTube windows and banner ads that use Flash go blank with a message, "aw snap!"

Like FireFox, Chrome remembers all the windows it had open. If it crashes or the computer is shut down, it opens them all again when it restarts.

Does this additional information suggest any possible solutions?

Any help would be gratefully appreciated.


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## MikeNewman (May 21, 2004)

I may have a fix for this problem, which I got from another forum when I was researching something else. I applied it this morning, put my computer into hybernation after watching a few short YouTube videos and the fix seemed to be working. Tonight it still seems to be working.

It has to do with the Windows XP swapfile. Here's what I did:

1 I moved the swapfile from its normal C partition on the internal disk onto the D partition.

2 I defragmented the C partition.

3 I moved the swap file back, changing it from default size (1500 MB min, 3000 MB max) to 2500 min and 2500 max.

4 I ran a few short YouTube videos and visited several pages of economist.com, which makes extensive use of Flash for online banner ads to check whether the problem had disappeared. It had.

To manipulate the swap file settings (instructions for Windows XP Professional, other versions of Windows may vary):

1 Click on Start

2 right-click on My Computer 

3 click on Properties

4 click on Advanced tab

5 click on Settings in the Performance section

6 Click on Advanced tab

7 Near the bottom of the tab in the Virtual memory section click on Change

8 Assuming you have a D partition or an external USB hard drive, click on C: and select No paging file; click on Set; you will get a warning message; proceed

9 click on D: (or your external drive), click the Custom size button and set both Initial Size and Maximum size at 2.5 times your computer's memory (eg for 1 GB memory, set both to 2500 MB).

10 Click OK and again OK. The system will then want to reboot. Let it.

11 With no applications running other than your normal security stuff, defragment the C partition:

(a) Click Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Disk Defragmenter
(b) Select C: partition and click Defragment
(c) It may say that the disk does not need defragmenting but do it anyway

12 Now move the swapfile back to C:, a similar process to steps 1-10 above, keeping the min and max swapfile sizes the same, as you set them before.

13 After the reboot check out some short YouTube clips or whatever is your most troublesome Flash content.

14 This process sounds long and tedious, but it is straight-forward (it took me about an hour and a half, including the defrag that Windows said I did not need to do, the reboots and recovering from two or three blind alleys) and I know of no significant risks that it introduces. If you are cautious you might like to do a backup first. Let us know the result.

If you don't have anywhere to move the swapfile and have to leave it on C:, reboot, defrag C: as described above. Then change the swapfile min and max to be the same, as described above.

As mentioned in my previous post I have seen a problem that sounds similar reported by people running Ubuntu Linux. As Linux swapfile management is probably rather different from that of Windows, there may still be stuff about Flash behaviour that the fix I have described does not address. On the other hand I saw this problem when I was using IE6 and the IE plugin for Flash is different from the one for Firefox and Chrome.

Anyway, I hope I have helped a few people and I'll now go back to this week's edition of economist.com.


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