Random freezing upon fullscreen flash

[TMRaven]

I've had my i7 iMac for months now, and it's acted perfectly with no hassles or quirks at all-- until the past couple weeks after I installed 4gb of kingston ram.

The problem occurs whenever I enter fullscreen mode with flash programs-- rather it be fullscreening a youtube video or a livestream. It's more of a 2-3 second freeze, rather than a full-scale freeze. After the freeze, the computer acts normal again, but iStat menus shows one of the lynnfield's processing cores to have a sudden spike in usage for that small period of time (a spike that reaches to the top of that specific core's capacity)

It's not an everytime type of deal, and I only get it maybe once every other day, but it seems to be happening after installing the additional ram. System Profiler has the ram as running fine, and repairing disk permissions doesn't do any help either. I highly doubt it has anything to do with the SMC or PRAM either.

 

[Hellhammer]

Take it away and try with original setup? All software is up to date right?

 

[TMRaven]

I currently have console log running to see what it says if I ever get one of those freezes again. If that doesn't work, I'll try to take the ram out. I just don't see how new ram would correlate with a very, very particular instance in Flash.

Yeah all my software's uptodate.

 

[Vylen]

I currently have console log running to see what it says if I ever get one of those freezes again. If that doesn't work, I'll try to take the ram out. I just don't see how new ram would correlate with a very, very particular instance in Flash.

Yeah all my software's uptodate.

I think it's just flash being its usual ******* self

For me, that couple second lag is normal, heh - sure I'm on an older iMac but it's just the way it goes.

With Google Chrome, Safari, and recently, Firefox now running plugins in sandboxed processes, their behaviour in terms of lower-level memory access/cpu is different compared to being run within the browser process.

 

[TMRaven]

The thing about it is, I never got those mini freezes until after installing the new ram, and from a lot of past experiences I know coincidences are too good to be true.

During a freeze, my top menubar and dock still appear on the screen when I fullscreen flash, and I won't be able to click anything. In fact the first time my computer froze like that, iStat menus vanished for a good 30 seconds or so.

Will submit that system/console log report whenever it happens again.

 

[TMRaven]

I've reset Safari and emptied its cache, and the problem hasn't happened so far. I've been closely monitoring the system and console log, and the only notes I'm constantly getting are coming from better touch tool resetting itself due to "critical limit."

However upon fullscreening flash with safari, I do get this message:

Is it a problem? If so, how would I go about fixing it.

 

[Vylen]

I've reset Safari and emptied its cache, and the problem hasn't happened so far. I've been closely monitoring the system and console log, and the only notes I'm constantly getting are coming from better touch tool resetting itself due to "critical limit."

However upon fullscreening flash with safari, I do get this message:

Is it a problem? If so, how would I go about fixing it.

Probably not, and you can't fix it. That's a software concern. Whoever made whatever needs to do it.

 

[illumin8]

Just a suggestion: Try the beta Gala version of Flash. I'm not sure it's completely stable yet, but it's technically supposed to use QE to accelerate flash content now so you might get better framerates.

Also, please let me know if you can get 30fps on fullscreen Hulu video on the i7 iMac. I'm considering getting one myself and it would be nice to know if Flash performs well enough to watch full screen flash without stuttering.

 

[TMRaven]

I'm currently running version 10.1 of flash-- is the gala beta an alternate version of 10.1? If so, where do I download it?

I'd be glad to tell you if I could get 30fps fullscreen hulu or not, but how do I would I go about seeing the framerate of hulu? Should I find some form of 720p/1080p content on hulu to test on?

 

[illumin8]

You can download the "Gala" pre-release here:

http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

It's different than the Flash Player 10.1 that is publicly available. In Mac OS X 10.6.3, Apple released new APIs that allowed Adobe to directly access graphics hardware to accelerate flash playback.

I've installed it on my wife's MacBook, but it only has an Intel GMA3100 graphics chip so I haven't seen much benefit. On your i7 iMac I would expect you should see a huge boost in performance watching full screen Flash content.

 

[TMRaven]

Unfortunately, the Gala beta is only available for nvidia gpus, and my iMac has an ati 4850 in it.

How do I know if I get 30fps or not in a hulu video? Which video should I use for the benchmark? I'm pretty sure the lynnfield would get 30 fps in flash, it's a monster of a cpu.

 

[illumin8]

Unfortunately, the Gala beta is only available for nvidia gpus, and my iMac has an ati 4850 in it.

How do I know if I get 30fps or not in a hulu video? Which video should I use for the benchmark? I'm pretty sure the lynnfield would get 30 fps in flash, it's a monster of a cpu.

That's too bad that they don't support ATI GPUs yet... I don't really know of a benchmark video either, but you should be able to visually tell if there is stuttering if you watch a TV show. If you watch scenes where the camera pans across a room, you would be able to tell if there is any jerkiness or dropped frames.

 

[TMRaven]

Oh. No the the lynnfield handles fullscreen flash just fine. In fact I could be running multiple hd flash streams at the same time, and the cpu will only show 20% workload of its total capacity.

The freezing I was talking about is just some quirk in flash specific content upon fullscreening flash-- and it conveniently happened after I installed new ram. Console says nothing when this happens, so my last test is to take the added ram out and see if I still get the problem.