Why is Flash performing so badly in 10.10 64-bit compared to 10.04 64-bit?

Question

Edit: After discovering some more about the problem (namely that it seems to be caused by waking from suspend) I created a new question.

In Ubuntu 10.04 64-bit, I was running the latest 64-bit Flash beta with Google Chrome 64-bit (stable) and I was seeing smooth performance (even in full screen), extremely reasonable CPU usage, and no issues with lock-ups. Compared to my MacBook, the experience was remarkably better. It even solved the issue where hitting volume keys would kick me out of full-screen mode.

In 10.10, with (to my knowledge) exactly the same setup, I'm getting ridiculous CPU usage, and full screen performance has gone from perfect to unusable (this is happening because it's flooring a 4-core i5 processor—no small feat). I'm also back to not being able to hit the volume keys without kicking Flash out of full screen and showing a frozen video player until I scroll the window, something that I fixed in 10.04 from overriding the built-in system Flash install (which I think was the 32-bit version with npviewer) with the latest beta.

This is on a completely fresh install on a Lenovo X201 (no proprietary drivers). Anyone have any clue what's going on? This is pure speculation, but it feels like this has something to do with hardware acceleration not kicking in properly (the spike in CPU usage would support this).

Thanks!

EDIT: Some more details: I've noticed that embedded YouTube players flicker annoyingly often, even outside of full-screen mode, which doesn't happen on YouTube pages. Also, even HTML5 videos on YouTube, when put into full-window mode, are somewhat choppy. Movie Player doesn't miss a beat when playing 1080p videos, so it's possible that this is a Chrome rendering problem, not necessarily a Flash problem.

Answer 1

See these tutorials:

Flash Issues & Solutions

Flash Optimization

Although they are primarily focused on Firefox, most of the content applies to Chrome as well.

For Firefox users with Flash problems, get these two extensions I develop:

FLASH-AID: remove conflicting flash plugins from Ubuntu Linux systems and install the appropriate version according to system architecture.

FlashVideoReplacer: this extension replaces embedded flash videos with Quicktime or Windows Media Player compatible videos, allowing to watch flash streaming content with a less CPU intensive plugin, like gecko mediaplayer (recommended), gxine, kaffeine, mozplugger, totem, xine, vlc (not recommended).

Answer 2

At this point, I'm not 100% why, but after restarting my machine today, the performance seems to be back to how it was in 10.04.

Looking in my Software Centre history, I'm seeing that compiz, compiz-core, compiz-gnome, compiz-plugins, and libdecoration0 were updated today. I also removed banshee and rhythmbox, which may have touched some graphics library or something (I'm thinking that's a long shot though).

I'll be sure to update this answer if I ever figure out exactly what the problem was, but in the meantime, I'd say that the Compiz upgrade was likely the fix.

Answer 3

On 10.04 the latest version 10.1.102.65 and the square 64bit version suck big time. Flash apps just show blank space in Chrome, which gives the best performance.

I have to use an older version, 10.0 r45, to get any usability and better performance.