Tuesday, May 27th, 2008 at 12:59 pm
Mac Users: Is Flash Streaming Burning Your CPU?
If you’re a Mac OS X user using services like Justin.TV, Ustream, Stickam, etc to stream video online, you could be burning your machine without even being aware of it. There is a nasty bug in Adobe Flash Player 9 for Mac OS X which makes your CPU go crazy.
I discovered this while testing various online video streaming services that use the Adobe Flash Player. I observed my CPU quickly crank up anytime I started to stream content for all the services I tried, so it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t an issue with the service provider.
Probing further, I realized this problem didn’t affect my Windows and Linux boxes: obviously Mac OS X and Flash 9 (the version of flash I was using) don’t get along that well when streaming.
Interestingly, the bug seem to affect only the audio: disabling the audio (while streaming video) brought the CPU usage to normal level, while disabling the video (with audio only streaming) shot the CPU usage right backup gain.
There is no fix for this issue yet, but here is a simple way to go around the problem: simply upgrade your version of Adobe Flash Player to the latest version, Flash 10.
But keep in mind that Adobe Flash Player Flash 10 is still a beta software and is potentially unstable. That said, I’ve been running it continuously for more than 24 hours, and have not had any issues with it. Yet. Within this period, I’ve had both Safari and Firefox crash two or three times each 
Here’s what to do to get Adobe Flash Player 10 running on your machine …
First, head over to CNET’s Version Tracker website and download the latest version of Flash 10. As of this writing, he latest version available for download was 10.0.1.218.
Note that Adobe requires that you uninstall any prior installed versions of Flash Player before you install the version 10 beta! You’ll find the link to download the Adobe Flash Player Uninstaller from the Version Tracker website.
Hope this solves your CPU overload issues while streaming audio content with Adobe Flash Player on Mac OS X. If you have any question about this, don’t hesitate to ask: I’m here for you. Leave a comment, or come over to the Chat Room for a live conversation.
I knew you'd ask! George Appiah is a traveling technology consultant helping individuals, small businesses and non-profits leverage technology to hack poverty out of the world. Not enough for you? 
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That was driving me nuts - thanks for publishing this tip. I could not even have a website with a flash ad on it open without killing my battery in 45 minutes.
@Mark: I’m glad you found it useful.
Thanks George - I’ll give it a go.
[...] ansehe. FireFox lief bei ca. 80 - 90% CPU-Auslastung und Safari 100 - 110%. Nach einer kurzen Recherche habe ich auch schon eine Antwort gefunden, die da lautet: BUG. In der 9er Version vom [...]
oh. my. god. this has been killing me forever. i’ve been hating on adobe so much, with safari rendering general website and from time to time throwing 100% cpu at flash - SYSTEM processes taking 100% cpu. so my poor little powerbook g4 couldn’t even quit safari for all the patience in the world.
i’m so tired of having to force-reboot (control-flower-power, anyone?) and lose my work just because i followed a link from an email and it rendered a site with a slew of youtube embedded movies.
and this fixed it.
you fixed it.
thank you.
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