Faster than Ninjas

in

Mark Pilgrim pointed out that even Mozilla is having to put Flash integration on hold for their Maemo version. I am reminded of a post by John Chen in the Flash Poor Performance on Max OS X tracking bug indicating that OSX performance wasn't of primary concern to Adobe as

our highest priority will be optimizing our player to be faster than ninjas for mobile phones

The post has since been removed but I pulled it from an email update. It appears that John had revised the post and it was eventually deleted from the forums. Nevertheless the performance ninjas haven't shown up yet.

Faster Than Ninjas comment

Flash 10 Still a Poor Performer on Macs and Linux

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YouTube recently switched to a widescreen format and while browsing around to test out the quality I was still shocked at the poor performance of Flash on a Mac, specifically with video. The playback is jerky and constantly pauses in both Firefox and Safari. Restarting the browser helps a bit but by no means solves the problem.

I had recently downloaded Flash Player 10 (10,0,12,36 at the time of this post) and noticed a slight improvement in playback and performance but still not what I would consider acceptable for video. Ars Technica published an article in October benchmarking Flash Player 10. On a Mac Pro, Flash 10 used between 25% and 75% of CPU resources. On the same hardware running Windows it used 6% CPU. On my MacBook Pro 2.33GHz I see between 30%-45% CPU usage watching YouTube. The difference in performance here is enormous and I assume is the result of a product coded for Windows first and then ported to the Mac.

I haven't been able to find any peformance tweaks that would improve video playback but I did find a bug reported against Flash 10 for poor performance on the Mac in the Adobe Flash bug tracker.  Register a bug tracking account and vote it up please.