RAM questions

[lordofduct]

Is it when you fullscreen the video?

Flash eats up TONS of resources when you full screen video. While you are watching anything with the flash plug-in right click somewhere on the flash movie and click "Settings..." in the funny looking window that pops up go to the click the tab that has a picture of a monitor and a paint brush and make sure you have "hardware acceleration" turned on. This will make flash use Open-GL (or DirectX for windows users) for rendering and also will allow your GPU to take some of the heat for it (if you don't have a vid card, this may not make a huge difference).

Safari does play a role in making flash run a bit slower. I've ran a standalone player side by side against the safari plug-in and noted that the Safari plug-in runs like crap in comparison. I don't know about overheating though, safari and flash plug-in shouldn't be causing that...

VLC will always run faster. VLC will play the flash flv video format (which isn't exactly a flash movie, it's a video codec that flashplayer supports) and it will use hardware acceleration when available. The resources needed for playing back an flv vs a swf are completely different.

Oh and you may want to make sure you have flash default set to low or medium quality settings. This will help reduce needed resources.



Also you may want to get some system monitor software, something that probes the temperature and stuff of your hardware and monitor it while you're doing tasks. Check how hot your machine is getting when doing stuff. Maybe even throw a stress test benchmark at it while you do this and see what benchmarks make the temp jump high. The fans are coming on because the mobo is reading high temps SOMEWHERE. May it be the processor, firmware, memory manager, memory itself... what not.

I'm assuming this is a Core 2 Duo mac... is it an older one? Because I know the E series of Core 2 Duos have heat issues. I've had 4 of them overheat on me or my friends that I work on computers for. 1 of which was boiling at 105C at one point!

I only bring up these last 2 paragraphs because I highly doubt it's just Flashplayer causing the issue. It just may be the stressor that makes it more noticeable (if you're like most normal computer users, you aren't throwing a lot of heavy duty work at the machine... web-surfing, email, movies, these aren't huge stressors... well some movies can be). I bet there is other software that could be causing it as well you just haven't noticed doing it, my flash settings suggestions are to try to get the issue manageable for now, but you should really look into running a benchmark stress test on it. And if something arises I'd bring that thing down to Mac and make them fix it... I'm told how "great" their service is (hopefully it's not rumours, for your sake).

All I can say about the memory thing is more RAM really isn't going to help you out all that much. More RAM will just help you run MORE apps at once, and help those apps start up a little faster. But if you're running 32-bit OSX your only going to be able to fit another gig or so of RAM in there that will be supported (depending the size of your swap disk that is, Apple may call it "virtual memory" or something, but it's essentially swap disk from BSD... Windows users know this as 'pagefile').

[RCBH928]

thanx for the detailed information lordofduct

I use istat pro(widget) to monitor the heat, and I look at the CPU heat

My flash settings are as you said, on hardware acceleration
it doesn't run that hot, but fans turn only only when I am playing flash or running games like WoW. I am pretty sure flash shouldn't be as exhausting as WoW. By flash I mean flash videos like daily motion and youtube.

For a couple of videos it won't matter but if watching longer videos like 10 min, or consecutive ones or watching live feedback it will start to turn the fans on.
It turns really hot(75-80C) when encoding avi to dvds.

My macbook is the ones that are firewire-less., they are just the models before they added the firewire back in. I also believe they take in 4GB RAM not 3.

[lordofduct]

My macbook is the ones that are firewire-less., they are just the models before they added the firewire back in. I also believe they take in 4GB RAM not 3.

The mobo probably supports 4 gigs, maybe even 8.

It's the OS that has an issue. 32-bit os's can only support 4 gigs of memory, and this includes swap disk (virtual memory, pagefile)... I think mac defaults a 1 gig swap disk or something. Which would cause a 3 gig cap.

It's similar to Win XP reserving at minimum 512 megs of pagefile, hence a max 3.5 gigs in XP 32-bit.



If you have 64-bit, this is all arbitrary because 64-bit supports a shit ton of memory... an amount that no motherboard can even reach yet.




Oh and note, I've read reports that OSX does not accurately report memory usage in its memory monitoring. It may report more or less memory then is actually accessible. Or sometimes reporting the swap as actual memory... which I find weird. Not something I've verified (I don't own a Mac), just something I've read at a few online computer tech magazines.

[Niode]

This happens on all Mac laptops it seems. Both my Macbook Pro 15" and my fiancée's 17" Macbook Pro run the fans at full speed when using flash. I'm running 10.5.8 and my fiancee is running the last version of OS 10.4.

I have no idea why it does it and there isn't (as far as I know) any way to stop it happening automatically (I was alarmed that the fans were running so much despite the load being next none, I searched around to find out the problem but it seems it's not been enough of a problem for anyone to do anything about it). The only work around is using something like SMC to manually control the fans on your Mac. This 'should' override the automatic fan load when running flash.

[RCBH928]

i'll try using firefox instead of safari to see if it won't have as much of a problem