Restaurant City and other Facebook games slow

Question

Level 2

321 points

Restaurant City and other Facebook games slow

I bought my wife a fancy new MBA for xmas with the plan of inheriting her old MBP. Alas all is not well as one of her main uses for it is playing all those flash games on facebook, namely Restaurant City & Pack Rat, but the performance is plain ordinary. Just a simple rollover on a button takes a good second to appear, drop down menues can take two or 3 seconds to activate, and animations are like they're in slow motion. I realise I bought the entry level model of MBA and I know all the history of Flash on the Mac, but is this really the best I can expect from a brand new machine? I've downloaded the latest beta version of Flash (10.2), it helped only marginally. I've also noticed Firefox seems to run the games a lot faster than Safari does. Still nowhere near what our 3yr old 2.4ghz Macbook Pro runs them at. Activity monitor has Flash running at between 80%-140% CPU with safari. Firefox runs it at around 60%-80% which seems to reflect the performance difference I'm seeing.

Is this as good as it gets?

Macbook Air 1.4ghz 11" 2GB Ram, Mac OS X (10.6.6)

Posted on Jan 10, 2011 4:48 AM

Answer 1

Jan 10, 2011 3:57 PM in response to Aaron Johns

Hi Aaron,

Try emptying the Safari cache more often. Command + Option + E or from the Safari menu bar click Safari / Empty Cache.

Make sure there isn't a Safari Extension slowing things down. Go to Safari / Preferences then select the Extensions tab. You can turn Extensions off there to test.

And, make sure it's not a Safari unsupported third party app causing the lag time. Troubleshooting help here.

Safari: Unsupported third-party add-ons may cause Safari to unexpectedly quit or have performance issues

Also with Safari... go to Safari / Preferences - Security. Make sure Java is enabled.

Carolyn 🙂

Answer 2

Aaron Johns Author

Level 2

321 points

Jan 11, 2011 5:54 PM in response to Carolyn Samit

Thanks Carolyn,

I had no extensions installed, and java was enabled. I emptied the cache but it doesn't seemed to have noticeably helped. Interestingly, if I look at the activity monitor on the MBPro I get very similar results in both Firefox and Safari. Firefox just seems to be doing a much better job at handling intensive flash sites.

Never mind, unless you have any other suggestions I might try a fresh system install and see if that helps. Or maybe Apple and Adobe will kiss and make up soon and get this whole mess sorted out once and for all. Won't hold my breath though. 🙂

Aaron.

Answer 3

Jompet

Level 1

0 points

Jan 12, 2011 10:58 AM in response to Aaron Johns

I recommend you try using Google Chrome. I've been disappointed with Safari and Firefox of late especially with regards to Flash performance.

Chrome has Flash buit in so you need not install any plugins.

Answer 4

Aaron Johns Author

Level 2

321 points

Jan 16, 2011 7:50 PM in response to Jompet

Hey good tip, hadn't even considered Chrome but it does feel faster. Still a tad sluggish at times but its now at least useable. What a sad state of affairs when a third party can build a faster browser than Apple on their own hardware.