Workaround for Flash Player 10 performance issue.

Metamorf · 07-31-2009, 08:06 AM

After digging around trying to find some way to increase performance of the Adobe Flash Player Plugin v10.0, I found a culprit.

nspluginwrapper

This plugin provides a wrapper for legacy Netscape plugins and seems to, quite unnecessarily, stick a layer of overhead on top of the flash player plugin.

so...
a) check you have a 32-bit machine, as a 64-bit machine is going to need the wrapper regardless.
b) check you have no use for nspluginwrapper (its package provides the command 'mozilla-plugin-config'. This will show you what plugins are actually wrapped)

Code:

$ mozilla-plugin-config --list
...
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins-wrapped/nswrapper_32_32.libflashplayer.so
  Original plugin: /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins/libflashplayer.so
  Wrapper version string: X (1.3.0)
...

c) uninstall nspluginwrapper using your distro's package manager (typically apt-get or yum)
d) restart your browser

...after removing the offending package, I noticed that my CPU load, when playing a YouTube video, dropped from ~95% to ~60%. Not as good as the ~30% when using mplayerplugin, but workable nonetheless. Also, full screen video was watchable albeit with nearly full CPU load & a little shearing.

Metamorf · 08-08-2009, 05:12 AM

Ooops... gonna have to call "bullshit" on myself for this one...

(a) the test video I used was a low-res one that needed less CPU to run. Other videos showed no appreciable difference in load.
(b) regardless of the video resolution the video stream annoyingly paused about every 30 sec. The wrapper, it seems, was designed to get around this.

Ergo, ignore everything I said. nspluginwrapper should stay.