[K12OSN] I need to make Flash work faster....wanna pitch

Peter Hartmann ascensiontech at gmail.com
Mon Dec 5 18:32:22 UTC 2005


Thanks William,
I'll give the drivers a try.  I'd say that since I couldn't log in at
the server itself that it was cpu related.  We have a gigabit backbone
with bond0 using 4 nics. I wonder if there is a way to disallow the
"high quality" mode in flash?

> 4) Block all the flash ads that you can. A lot of "kids" educational
> sites are also full of Flash adverts that compound the problem.

I there a special blacklist having to do with this?

> If you haven't, run "top" in the terminal and try to find which
> specific client (and therefore animation) is causing problems in terms

I did. That's how I came up with 70% for the culprits.  It's pretty
much any game on the Disney site.  Could someone try this one so I can
compare?

http://disney.go.com/disneychannel/playhouse/koalabrothers/games/planegame.html

  I wonder if the nice could be applied to this problem.  Is there
away to make the flash plugin show up as a process to be niced?


Thanks,
Peter


On 12/5/05, William Fragakis <william at fragakis.com> wrote:
>
> Flash is a more critical technological issue than many people outside of
> education realize -
>
> Things we've found:
> 1) Flash creates a huge datastream. I presume you have a gigabit
> connection between your server and switch. Each client can easily suck
> up 10-15 mb per second. Beyond 5-6 clients on a normal Flash page would
> saturate a 10/100 network and add a few instances of Tuxtype being used
> by other students and you couldn't get past 4-5.
>
> 2) It's important that your clients use a specific video driver, not a
> generic.
>
> 3) Sometimes you get a Flash animation done in "high quality" mode.
> Those will kill a server as they require 2-3x the cpu as a normal
> animation.
>
> 4) Block all the flash ads that you can. A lot of "kids" educational
> sites are also full of Flash adverts that compound the problem.
>
> We run Flash-based testing programs (ie Accelerated Reader) and
> educational web sites without much problem now, especially after
> implementing points 1 and 2. If the Disney site is using high rez
> animations, there isn't much you can do. A couple of bad adverts were
> killing our dual core P4 as well. I'm not sure that a 64bit Opteron is
> going to give you much of an advantage on running Flash over a regular
> desktop processor anyway - I could be dead wrong on this.
>
> Now, if I could figure out how to run Shockwave...
>
> If you haven't, run "top" in the terminal and try to find which
> specific client (and therefore animation) is causing problems in terms
> of cpu load or if it is really a network issue, in which case you'll
> still have CPU headroom but the animations will lag. In our experience
> with Flash, it wasn't CPU utilization that brought the CPU to it's
> knees but a saturated network.
>
> If you wish, let us know which animations they were running and others
> can see how it behaves on their networks, too.
>
> Regards,
> William Fragakis
> morrisbrandon.com
> > We're also having major flash problems. 4 kids running disney.com
> > games brought our dual opteron server to its knees today. I couldn't
> > even log in on the console. I had to  ssh in just to 'init 6'.  Each
> > of their firefox-bin processes was trying to suck up 70% cpu.  Is that
> > typical?
> >
>
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