[Openchrome-users] Slow performance with Flash player#

[Brian Candler]

Hello,

I'm finding that playback of streaming video with Flash player 9 seems very
slow - in the range 1 to 4 frames per second - and I was just wondering if
there's anything I can do to speed it up. To demonstrate, I use this site:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/parenting/video/info.shtml
(click on "Click here to start")

The sound is perfect, but the talking head shows about 1 frame per second.
To get to a real video, click (e.g.) "Child Development" then "Learning to
speak" and "skip intro". This views at maybe 3-4 frames per second.

Now, this low frame rate *might* be an attribute of the source material -
but I suspect not, given that my CPU utilisation jumps up to 100% when
playing.

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
14608 brian     25   0  150m  57m  24m R 94.4 12.1   2:42.88 firefox-bin
 5225 root      15   0 77700  31m 7088 S  2.0  6.6  33:32.90 Xorg
...

OK, so here is some info about my system:

HARDWARE
--------

Epia M-10000, 512MB RAM

$ lspci | grep VGA
0000:01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8623 [Apollo CLE266] integrated CastleRock graphics (rev 03)

SOFTWARE
--------

Ubuntu 6.06, fully up to date.

$ uname -a
Linux mappit 2.6.15-28-386 #1 PREEMPT Thu May 10 09:45:43 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux

$ dpkg-query -l | grep VIA
ii  xserver-xorg-driver-via                0.1.33.2-0ubuntu4       X.Org X server -- VIA display driver

$ dpkg-query -W flash-plugin
flash-plugin    9.0.31.0-release-1

(I downloaded the .rpm from the Adobe site, and used alien to convert it to
a .deb, then dpkg -i)

$ dpkg-query -W firefox
firefox 1.5.dfsg+1.5.0.12-0ubuntu0.6.06.1

INTERNET CONNECTION
-------------------

Tiscali Business 2M ADSL, Speedtouch router. This is all set up properly and
works fine (i.e. I can download FTP files at ~250KB per second)

The above BBC site is hosted in the UK, and I'm in the UK too.

X LOGS
------
$ grep -1 support Xorg.0.log
(--) Chipset CLE266 found
(!!) VIA Technologies does not support or endorse this driver in any way.
(!!) For support, please refer to http://www.openchrome.org/ or
(!!) your X vendor.
--

So that's why I ended up at the OpenChrome forum :-)

Xorg.0.log attached below, gzipped.

The only slightly odd thing I'm doing with this system is having two X
sessions logged in at once - my wife is on Ctrl-Alt-F7 and I'm on
Ctrl-Alt-F8. I've not tried running with just one login, but having two
hasn't caused any problems before.

Any ideas on how to improve things, or is my system just underpowered for
the job?

Thanks,

Brian.
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