How Stop Adobe Flash From Being Cpu Intensive (kinda)

Whilst it may be a standard for the Internet, Adobe Flash also set a new standard for how quickly it can tax the CPU and drain your battery.

However the other day I made a simple discovery on how to reduce the CPU usage was watching any flash video. It seems that whilst watching a video and pressing right click to bring up the context menu your CPU usage can drop as much as 40%

Don’t believe me? Take a look at these 2 pictures.  The 1st one shows normal playback and CPU monitoring with the ever popular program iStat.

Then, was watching a flash stream, I right clicked on the video to bring up the dialogue box and is you can see my CPU usage dropped from 61% to 37% in this one situation alone. Normally it’s maxing at 70 to 80 and it drops to below 40% with no frame rate or quality effect.

It’s not an elegant solution to the problem but one that does give you a little bit of CPU overhead.

Another example taken from a popular UK streaming site, tvcatchup.com.  As you can see the CPU meter on the right at the op is constant at it’s usage levels.

Now let do nothing more than a right click, let things settle and see what the cpu usage goes to..

It’s dropped down to 36% and been stable at that level for quite a while now.  A colleague of mine also tested this on his intel rig and the same effect. A noticeable drop in the level of cpu usage.