Saturday, May 24, 2008

Flash CS3 with MacbookPro = Very Slow

A few weeks ago my old Windows laptop suddenly went into a blue screen nose dive from which it never recovered.  Given the choice between a Vista based laptop and a Macbook Pro the choice seemed obvious.  But during the week I finally had a chance to return to a Flash  game I'm developing.  There were a few missing font issues due to differences between Mac and PC standard fonts but that didn't take long to sort out.  So finally I'm testing my physcis based game for the first time on my Mac and it runs like a dog.  It ran real smooth on my crappy old PC and it runs real smooth when I run it in the browser.  So why does it look like a slow motion replay when run from Flash CS3 on the Macbook Pro.  I had installed all available CS3 updates the day before this.  So I felt confident I had the latest version and any bug fixes would be applied.  Naturally I started searching the forums and yes there were many posts on performance issues for Flash CS3 on the Macbook Pro.  Mostly I found complaints but I did come across one totally insane idea that the crazed writer claimed worked.  To remove all performamce issues they open and close the Flash help panel and problem solved.  I was desperate and so I took the road less travelled and ,yes, my problem was solved.  Opening and closing the help panel in Flash CS3 removes all performance issues on the Macbook Pro.  Why and how the hell they came across this solution I have no idea.  It's like blue vein cheese.  How did anyone ever realise blue vein cheese should be eaten and not thrown away.  Oh, look the cheese is off!  No, no, no it's fine here try a piece.  My Flash app runs like a dog here let me just try opening the help panel.  How ever they did it I thank them.
Blogged with the Flock Browser

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

One wonder how much bad rap the Mac gets, when it's something involving poor software design from somewhere else?

How else would you explain it, given the solution?!?!?

geekglue said...

Hi David,

I can't imagine this problem in any way reflects on the Mac itself. A lot of people were glad that Adobe was taking over Macromedia because they were sure Adobe would tighten up the quality of Macromedia products. Perhaps that tightening doesn't extend to Mac versions. Sure is a weird bug.

Anonymous said...

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

I am developing Flash games and I was so frustrated because sometimes the performance was really good and the next day really bad. Gladly I found this post and just opened the help panel and closed, it worked!

Thanks again, you really saved my day!

Lauri

Anonymous said...

this is because Adobe has payed much less attention in developing a fast browser plugin or render engine for the flash player on a mac ... since mac only has a few % of the market

geekglue said...

Rez,

the benchmark tests I've seen for FP 10 show some really significant improvements in the players speed on the Mac. Which is great news for all. But I want to stress that this problem isn't entirely about the player. When I publish my slow running game and run it in the browser it runs exactly as expected. The problem occurs within the Flash development environment when testing the movie prior to opening the help panel. No doubt it has something to do with the player but it is restricted to the testing environment.