Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-05, 15:33

Hello all,

Currently I am writing this topic in Chrome, because palemoon becomes completely unrisponsive if I have pages with flash content open. The more pages with flash content I have, the worser it gets.
Also I have almost constantly 25% CPU load. It seems like it can't get any higher than that, but everytime it reaches 25% Palemoon gets unresponsive. See an example of the CPU load and memory usage here:

How do I know flash is the culprit? Now If I visit pages with flash content like youtube, or pages with embedded youtube videos, i have lagg. The cursor turns into a pointer when I hover over a flash item. When I then move my cursor to anywhere on the page, even in the adress bar, it stays as a pointer. I see items on the page blinking like if I hover over them while the mouse isn't even near that item. This causes huge lagg between the visible and actual location of the mouse pointer on flash sites...

Pages that are extremely difficult to handle are, for example, this one: http://forum.alliances.commandandconque ... ?tid=13554 and this one: http://nederland.fm/

Here's a dump of about:memory. Notice the game I'm playing using a lot of memory, but it doesn't make use of flash, java or silverlight. Only HTML5.

Thank you in advance!

Marcoevich

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2012-11-05, 16:45

The flash plugin should not run inside the palemoon.exe process. Running it inside the main thread can cause issues with more recent flash versions, so please check your preferences:

In the address bar, type about:config and press enter
In the configuration editor that opens, find the preferences that start with dom.ipc.plugins...
Right-click any entries that are displayed in bold typeface, and click "reset"
Exit and restart the browser

Specifically, you may have the following incorrect settings:
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled (should be set to true)
dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npswf32 (or similar) entry (should not be present)

This is a known issue, and unless the feature is forced off, flash should always be running out-of-process:

Mozillazine wrote:Flash plugin on Windows Vista and above

Starting in Firefox 14, Flash is force-enabled to run out-of-process in a plugin-container process on Windows Vista and above, because of stability issues when OOPP is disabled (bug #769721).

See also: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Plugin-container_and_out-of-process_plugins

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-05, 17:37

Thank you for your reply moonchild!

These are my settings:

I believe everything is as it should be. The only bold entry belongs to the IE-tab plugin if I'm correct.
If you look at the image in my previous post you might see the flash player plugin there, running as a seperate process

Do you have any more tricks I could try?

Thank you very much for your help!
Marcoevich

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2012-11-05, 17:48

Yes, those settings look fine, indeed.

Marcoevich wrote:If you look at the image in my previous post you might see the flash player plugin there, running as a seperate process

That, however, is not Pale Moon's plugin container (which it should be)! So, despite your settings, the Pale Moon plugin container is not running and thus not handling your Flash plugin as it should (leading to your problems). FYI: Pale Moon's plugin process is called "plugin-container.exe".

I'm wondering if the IETab add-on is causing issues there... Can you try disabling that and seeing if it helps?

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-05, 18:17

Well, the plugin-container is running, but it has only 5000 kb of memory, so I doubt it's doing anything useful

Why is all the flash content located in this flashplayer process and not in the plugin-container.exe ?

I have disabled IE-tab but that doesn't make a difference.

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2012-11-05, 18:41

Marcoevich wrote:Well, the plugin-container is running, but it has only 5000 kb of memory, so I doubt it's doing anything useful Why is all the flash content located in this flashplayer process and not in the plugin-container.exe ?

I honestly have no clue. It is certainly not normal behavior - did you manually associate the file extension with that executable? It looks like an installer to me, not an actual plugin, which is definitely wrong.

Does anyone else have any idea?, because I've never seen this before...

Blacklab · Unread post by **Blacklab** » 2012-11-05, 19:27

Not sure if this is any help - A few months back I ran across this article "How Firefox Loads Plugins" http://mike.kaply.com/2012/02/16/how-fi ... s-plugins/ by developer Mike Kaply which might give a few more ways to look at what is going on?

Perhaps also worth removing all Flash - use Adobe's Flash uninstaller to clean up - and then reinstall latest version/earlier stable version anew?

PS. And I learnt something this evening - Adobe did not implement the Flash Protected Mode (Sandbox) for XP at all!

In Para 4 of http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html Adobe ASSET team wrote:Today, with Windows 8 just around the corner and Windows XP usage rapidly decreasing, it did not make sense for the Flash Player team to make that same engineering investment for Windows XP. Therefore, we’ve focused on making Protected Mode for Firefox available on Windows Vista and later.

Which presumably explains why I had no problems running any of the latest Flash versions on my XP machine!

Did I just miss this somehow?

Apollo702 · Unread post by **Apollo702** » 2012-11-06, 09:26

I have been having significant Flash related problems lately too. It also especially happens when I have multiple Flash based sites up. I conducted an experiment by pulling up the identical tabs on several browsers and I did have a little less apparent problems. However this suggests:

1. Since the problems tend to be intermittent that could just be lucky timing.

2. The other browsers barely can even run add-ons. I run many on PM and even if there are some minor drawbacks there is no way in hell that I am giving up the enhanced power, security, privacy...

The bottom line is Flash ( and to a lesser extent Java) are the kinds of things that you (somewhat) need- but they are going to cause a heap of problems. Not only will they cause issues when in use but even the whole process of downloading and installing them tends to be loaded with issues. I used to always wonder why computers came without them and they made us download them. The most likely reason is nobody wants to get blamed for putting it there!

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-06, 09:48

Blacklab wrote:Not sure if this is any help - A few months back I ran across this article "How Firefox Loads Plugins" http://mike.kaply.com/2012/02/16/how-fi ... s-plugins/ by developer Mike Kaply which might give a few more ways to look at what is going on? Perhaps also worth removing all Flash - use Adobe's Flash uninstaller to clean up - and then reinstall latest version/earlier stable version anew?

PS. And I learnt something this evening - Adobe did not implement the Flash Protected Mode (Sandbox) for XP at all!
In Para 4 of http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html Adobe ASSET team wrote:Today, with Windows 8 just around the corner and Windows XP usage rapidly decreasing, it did not make sense for the Flash Player team to make that same engineering investment for Windows XP. Therefore, we’ve focused on making Protected Mode for Firefox available on Windows Vista and later.
Which presumably explains why I had no problems running any of the latest Flash versions on my XP machine! Did I just miss this somehow?

Well, thanks for your input man. I will try the uninstall tool now, as currently I am having a totally unresponsive browser again, eating 2 gb's of memory. I want to know where this comes from but I can't even open about:memory. So I will shut everything down and try the uninstall tool first. I'll let you know if that helps

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-06, 10:57

Uninstalling didn't work either. I removed flashplayer entirely, even tried again with revo uninstaller. But nothing changes..

How can I start palemoon without addons? Maybe that will do something..

Edit: well this is awkward. I restarted the browser 10 minutes ago, now it's already on 900 mb memory and got a total freeze. Started just after I started playing a youtube video..

Rohugh · Unread post by **Rohugh** » 2012-11-06, 11:07

Marcoevich wrote:
How can I start palemoon without addons? Maybe that will do something..

Click the Pale Moon box top left, Help>Restart with Add Ons Disabled

Blacklab · Unread post by **Blacklab** » 2012-11-06, 12:57

This unresolved current thread on mozillaZine Firefox Support sounds like your situation? http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic ... &t=2594639 and if you read backwards you will find recent mozillaZine pages are strewn with Flash problems with varying degrees of relevance to your symptoms. Worth a read, but sadly no "magic bullet" solutions offered! Have you tried reverting to earlier Flash 10.3 and assume you are using Adblock Plus or other similar methods to block flash adverts embedded in pages?

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-07, 13:50

Well, the OP in that thread has windows xp and doesn't have the extra flash process running. The guy who tries to help him does have the extra process running however... I will keep an eye on this thread to see if he delivers something useful for me

I will first try without addons now, and then maybe revert to the earlier version. I'll let you know if it helps

buggy · Unread post by **buggy** » 2012-11-09, 09:17

Marcoevich wrote:Now If I visit pages with flash content like youtube, or pages with embedded youtube videos, i have lagg...

To avoid Flash with Youtube you can try the HTML5 video player: http://www.youtube.com/html5

johnb · Unread post by **johnb** » 2012-11-09, 20:02

Hi, You might try PM portable. I'm running with PM portable and not having this problem.

Marcoevich · Unread post by **Marcoevich** » 2012-11-16, 22:51

Hmm, I forgot this thread a little bit, until I saw my pc used 80% of his 8 gb available memory today and 2.6 gb of that was occupied by palemoon and the flashplayer (still running in it's own process)...

I've searched on google, but I can't find anything specific related to this problem. Why is this browser and the flashplayer using so much memory and why is the flashplayer still in it's own process? I don't have a clue about what's going on here...

Maybe I'll ask this again on the mozilla forums. I'll let you know if they can tell my anything useful

If you guys have any Ideas, just shout it, I will read them.

@ buggy, it looks like html5 player is already enabled, but still uses flash...

@ johnb, I have here this beautiful, fast and fine working browser complete with all settings and addons I use and now I should throw it away and try a portable? I will use that as a very last option. Let's try to fix it first!

thx for the replies all!

ninaholic · Unread post by **ninaholic** » 2012-11-19, 00:04

For me, most things are faster in PM15.3, but the revamped Palemoon site itself ( http://www.palemoon.org/ ) takes around 15 seconds to "initialize" for the first time on my Atom N2600 now (on my AMD C-50 it loads right away). In PM 3.6.32 it loads instantly though. I'm guessing this is because something Javascript was added to the page recently (maybe the Google +1 and Tweet icons are the culprit), or has something to do with Intel's crappy IGPU compatibility with recent Firefox versions, though I haven't tested it yet. I'll try blocking some page elements later and see what happens.

EDIT: I tried saving the Palemoon site as "webpage complete" and opening it, and that version runs instantly. I even uploaded the contents to a new website, and that runs instantly (0 second delay). It's ONLY the version on your site that takes 15 seconds to initialize. As far as I can tell, the only difference is that your site loads a different font (that doesn't get saved when you save as "web complete" for some reason), and maybe something on it is dynamic that gets turned to static when saved. I'd rather take a static html version than a 15 second hanging version any day though (especially on a site that says "Palemoon optimized browser", using the Pale Moon browser, which makes the wait kind of ironic

).

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2012-11-19, 08:14

The only difference with the revamp is a difference in style and different graphic images. The style loads custom fonts, which is probably the issue for you. It shouldn't take that long though - I'm curious here: if you try http://direct.palemoon.org/ does it display the same delay for you or not? If it doesn't, then I'll have to look at Cloudflare to check if there's a caching issue for the fonts.

ninaholic · Unread post by **ninaholic** » 2012-11-19, 23:29

Moonchild wrote:The only difference with the revamp is a difference in style and different graphic images. The style loads custom fonts, which is probably the issue for you. It shouldn't take that long though - I'm curious here: if you try http://direct.palemoon.org/ does it display the same delay for you or not? If it doesn't, then I'll have to look at Cloudflare to check if there's a caching issue for the fonts.

Hi Moonchild,

That direct link you posted experienced the same delay, so I guess that rules out the Cloudflare / caching issue. I just noticed that going to any Palemoon page with that style/font does the same hang too (like the info page). Basically: The borders and top image loads, then it pauses, then the fonts/text appear afterwards, so I think you're right. It's like the custom fonts trigger my computer (or HDD, ram, iGPU?) to go to a new "state", which takes some time to start up (or the fonts really take THAT long to commit/transfer to my memory for some reason) - or something.

Based on the "states" guess though, I tried switching my power settings from "Balanced" to "High Performance" (power cord/battery icon beside the clock on bottom-right), then restarting, and the site actually loaded instantly (for the first time since the revamp on my Atom N2600)! So I restarted and tried again in "High Performance" mode, and it opened instantly again. "Hooray!" I thought. Then I switched back to "Balanced" mode and restarting from cold boot, so I could see in more detail what could be "going on" during the freeze, and narrow down the exact feature that needed to be changed, but the site loaded instantly again! I'm not exactly sure what is going on here, something very cryptic indeed!

I've tried Googling words like "Atom N2600" and "browser hang pause freeze" together, oddly the top link was to an old post of mine on this forum. Haven't found any useful links from people experiencing something similar yet, then again I don't think many people decided to spend money on this wacky chip in the first place. I can't wait until Silvermont/Jaguar/Haswell 10W cpus come out in 2013-2014, maybe they'll fix whatever causes this odd 'hang' quirk completely by then.

Unread post by **Moonchild** » 2012-11-20, 00:15

Sounds like a definite quirk of the GPU, specifically if it is set to "low power" mode - it may have something to do with using cleartype on downloaded fonts, as a guess.
If you run into this issue again, you can try setting gfx.font_rendering.cleartype.use_for_downloadable_fonts to false
Or if it really is problematic and not cleartype related, and you need to use balanced or power saving modes often, you can set gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled to false to make sure the fallback (built in) font families are used instead of downloadable fonts. Of course websites will not look as intended by the designer in that case.

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Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

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Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

Re: Unresponsive, mostly on pages with flash content

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