Flash Content & Sys Resources

[Gavin McCullagh]

On Thu, 12 Oct 2006, Dominic Webb wrote:

> Is there anything that can be done to 'optimise' the use of (Macromedia)
> Flash on an LTSP network.

It's a very awkward problem so long as we don't have a fully capable
open source flash plugin.  If that were available, things might be a lot
more feasible.

If you find that flash player is causing you a lot of problems, there might
be some benefit to be had from installing flashblock for firefox.  This
will stop flash applets from opening by default.  The user then gets an
icon which they can click on to make the flash open.  So, flash doesn't
load every time there is a flash advert, but it can be opened by the user
for something like watching google video.

	http://flashblock.mozdev.org/

> A typical browser based instance of Flash is not the biggest resource
> hog in the world but it can become disproportionate when dealing with,
> say, interactive multimedia content.

Do you mean CPU time, RAM, network bandwidth or all of the above?  I have
considered limiting the bandwidth a client uses to stop it from over-using
the network due to streaming large animations, sound, etc. to the thin
client.  One could perhaps do this with iptables on the thin clients.

> If not (i.e. the only answer is more hardware) is this an area (software
> wise) that merits looking into?

I imagine one contribution would be to work on the gnash project.  A
working gnash would be a really big step forward for many reasons (it would
be possible to package it on the cdrom, it would work better with Jack/ESD,
it could be made leaner, the community could fix bugs, etc...).

	http://www.gnu.org/software/gnash/

Gavin