Flash Player Too Slow in Safari

Thanks for your response, Klaus. I have the latest version of Flash (10.0.32.18) as well as the latest version of Safari (4.0.3). I tried reinstalling Flash as you suggested, doing a permissions repair, and then restarting. After restarting, I only launched Safari, and at first, it seemed to play a YouTube video with less jerkiness (although there was still some jerkiness to it). However, once I launch my other applications (I usually have Mail, Microsoft Word, iTunes, and AOL Instant Messenger all open at once), Safari's Flash performance deteriorates. I tried launching only Firefox after restarting also, and when Firefox was the only application open, it seemed to be fairly smooth. It was MUCH better than what Safari was able to do, but still not as optimal as it should be (on my Windows computer, anything in Flash plays as smooth as butter -- and the ironic thing is, my Windows computer has only a 1.4GHz processor with 1 GB of RAM... much less than the hardware on my iMac).

I tried running System Optimizers (such as Socks and Cocktail) to clear the caches and such, but that didn't show any noticeable difference in Safari's Flash performance. I've also done several "Reset Safari..." run-throughs over the months, but they have never led to any improvement in Flash's performance.

I'm wondering if there is a setting that causes Safari to overwhelm itself with the prospect of loading a Flash video, to the point where it becomes disfunctional and slow. The unfortunate thing is that Safari's Preferences menu is so basic, so there basically no settings I could change to make Safari perform more optimally.

Another problem I’ve been having with Safari is that sometimes a YouTube video will try to load, but it will get stuck and freeze Safari. When this happens, I am left with no choice but to Force Quit. When I relaunch immediately after Force Quitting, Safari infinitely attempts to load my homepage (my homepage is set as http://livepage.apple.com), and no matter what web page I instruct Safari to load, it only shows the “Loading” spinner in the address bar. After about a minute, Safari works again. Although this may sound like an ISP problem, I know it’s nothing wrong with my internet connection because Firefox works just fine while Safari is stuck "loading". Is there maybe something restricting Safari from running properly? Or is there a possibility than my copy of Safari is corrupted? Keep in mind that this problem did not happen recently with the update to Safari 4… the same thing happened back when I had Safari 3. If it were a corrupted copy, I would imagine that updating to Safari 4 would have solved the problem... but obviously it did not. Also keep in mind that there was a time (way back when) when YouTube and Flash would function as smoothly as on my Windows computer. If you look at my stats below, my hardware has more than enough resources to be able to handle a YouTube video, and thus there should be no problem.

Does anyone have any other suggestions as to what I could do? Is there maybe a setting that is restricting Safari from using the resources it needs to load the Flash-based sites? I'd appreciate any help I can get!

Thanks in advance! 🙂

What you've described is certainly the same symptoms as I am having! And clearly both of our computers have more than enough resources (fast processors and sufficient memory) to run a Flash-based applet.

I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one experiencing these problems! Thanks for your input, Harold!

Your suggestion sounds great, Klaus! However I do not know how to identify what a third party component is. Is there a trick to identifying these third party components?

Below is a list of all the file names in the folders which you mentioned, and I have included a picture of each to show what the file icons look like.

Those that are italicized and underlined signify a subfolder.

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Here are the contents of: Macintosh HD/Library/Internet Plug-ins
ContentUploaderPlugin.plugin
CouponPrinter-FireFox.plugin
CouponPrinter-Safari.webplugin
DirectorShockwave.plugin
DivXBrowserPlugin.plugin
Flash Player.plugin
flashplayer.xpt
Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.plugin
Flip4Mac WMV Plugin.webplugin
iPhotoPhotocast.plugin
iPIXBrowserReadme.rtf
Java Applet Plugin Enabler
Java Applet.plugin
JavaPluginCocoa.bundle
MacCouponPrinter3.plugin
NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave
npdivx.xpt
npUpload.xpt
nsIQTScriptablePlugin.xpt
Quartz Composer.webplugin
QuickTime Plugin.plugin
QuickTime Plugin.webplugin
Silverlight.plugin
VerifiedDownloadPlugin.plugin
Disabled Plug-Ins
NP-PPC-Dir-Shockwave
ipxBrowserPlugin
ipxBrowserPlugin
Contents
Info.plist
MacOSClassic
ipxBrowserPlugin
Plug.prefs
PkgInfo
PlugIns
ipxKernel.cfm
Resources
BrowserPlugin.nib
classes.nib
info.nib
objects.xib
English.lproj
InfoPlist.strings
ipxBrowserPlugin.rsrc



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Here are the contents of: Macintosh HD/Library/Quicktime
AppleIntermediateCodec.component
DesktopVideoOut.component
DivX Decoder.component
DivX Encoder.component
DVCPROHDMuxer.component
DVCPROHDVideoDigitizer.component
DVCPROHDVideoOutput.component
DVCPROHDVideoOutputClock.component
DVCPROHDVideoOutputCodec.component
FCP Uncompressed 422.component
FLACImport.component
Flip4Mac WMV Advanced.component
Flip4Mac WMV Export.component
Flip4Mac WMV Import.component
LiveType.component
XiphQT.component



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Here are the contents of: User/Library/Internet Plug-ins
Move-Media-Player.plugin
RealPlayer Plugin.plugin
Unity Player.plugin



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There was no folder at: User/Library/Quicktime

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Thanks again for your help, Klaus! Hopefully we can get this thing solved soon! I have a feeling that we're getting close!!! 😀

Message was edited by: Fusion Factor

Hi Klaus. I think you're getting Harold and I confused. I'm the one that posted the images with my folders, so I'm the one with ipxBrowserPlugin in my system (and I'm not really sure what ipxBrowserPlugin is, haha... it's certainly not something that I was conscious of downloading). But seeing as Harold does not have it, and seeing as he has the same problem as I do, I would assume that ipxBrowserPlugin is not the root of the problem.

First I restarted my computer. When the computer finished restarting, I removed all the contents of all the above folders, and only putting in the "Flash Player.plugin" file. Then I opened Safari, and went to a Youtube video as well as http://www.wonka.com to check Flash's performance. It seemed like it was working better. Then I quit Safari and readded ALL the above files to see if there was any significant decrease in performance, but there wasn't any noticeable difference (between when there was only "Flash Player.plugin" in the /Macintosh HD/Internet Plug-in folder, and when there were ALL the files in their respective folders). As you suggested, in order to pinpoint a plugin that is creating slowness, I tried putting in files one-by-one, but each time there was no noticeable difference.

Any other suggestions/ideas as to what I could do? There does seem to be a lot of garbage files, and seemingly duplicate files, weighing down the folder. For example, I don't understand the difference between "QuickTime Plugin.plugin" and "Quicktime Plugin.webplugin".

Hopefully you, or someone else, has some additional insight as to what could be going wrong on both me and Harold's computers.

Hi Klaus,

I've been poking around various forums, looking for other people that have had similar problems. I tried following the suggestions in both of the following threads, but unfortunately none seemed to work:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=9944909#9916678
http://forums.macosxhints.com/showthread.php?t=47607

The suggestion to run a Sample Process for Safari in Activity Monitor yielded this result (I've only pasted the bottom summary portion of the sample process log):

{quote:title=*Sample of Safari*}{quote}

Total number in stack (recursive counted multiple, when >=5):
27 dyld stubwrite
12 pthreadbody
9 Flash_EnforceLocalSecurity
9 mach_msg
9 mach msgtrap
7 DefaultOutputAUEntry
6 CFRunLoopRunSpecific
6 __CFRunLoopRun
6 dyld stub__keymgr_get_and_lock_processwideptr
5 BufferedAudioConverter::FillBuffer(unsigned long&, AudioBufferList&, AudioStreamPacketDescription*)

Sort by top of stack, same collapsed (when >= 5):
mach msgtrap 1653
semaphore wait_signaltrap 723
semaphore timedwait_signaltrap 457
select 236
swtch_pri 25
pwrite 14
Sample analysis of process 5780 written to file /dev/stdout
Sampling process 5780 each 10 msecs 300 times

Are you able to understand what that means? It seems that there are a lot of "stacks" of Flash. Might this have something to do with the issue?

This has become utterly frustrating. Playing any YouTube video continues to yield a 100% CPU usage. Once any YouTube window is closed, CPU usage plummets to around 5-10%. I've been hoping and dreaming for Apple to release a Safari update that will make all my Safari troubles go away... or for Adobe to release an updated version of Flash to eliminate all this slowness that I have been experiencing... but neither of these wishful thoughts seem to be happening. :P

I'm going to go dig up my Mac OS X DVD and perform a disk repair to see if that does anything. If not, I'll consider performing a clean install. I'm truly at a loss of what to do, but hopefully if I do end up being pushed to the extreme of doing a clean install, that any and all of my current problems will be eradicated. Would you recommend me doing this, if worse comes to worst? Or is a clean install not something you would recommend.

Hopefully anyone has a solution as to what I could do so that I don't have to resort to that extreme.