Adobe Flash in Ubuntu Linux is slow as molasses. I’ve noticed it while playing Bejeweled Blitz in Facebook. I’ve tried installing different plugins like Shockwave, Gnash, Adobe Flash and Adobe Flash 10, but none made Flash any faster. The Flash games lagged so bad that they were practically impossible to play.
While googling tonight, I came across a website suggesting that I install a Flash plugin called Flashblock-Addon. This add-on plugin disables all Flash programs in a page from loading automatically. The programs can be played manually by clicking on the play button.
The reason this plugin works is because the Adobe Flash plugin for Linux is not tuned properly. This is not a Linux issue, but an Adobe one. The problem is particularly telling if a page has multiple instances of Flash programs running.
The plugin merely disables all flash programs from running automatically. The user can pick and choose which one they want to run limiting the number of Flash instances running in the background.
It’s not really a fix, but more of a workaround.
To install the Flashblock-Addon, you can download it from here.
Want flash running quickly and stutter free? Symlink the cache folder where your browser stores the files to a ram based drive. I can play flash video on my first gen netbook stutter free this way. I use the easier, hackey, /dev/shm
Hi George, I’m not familiar with running a cache folder to a ram drive. Do you mind sharing more details?
well it depends on what browser you are using. In chromium its located in ~/.cache/chromium/* (two folders), for google chrome, its ~/.cache/google-chrome
you can symlink from those two folders individually to the ram based drive or /dev/shm
heres a link to creating a linux ram disk: http://www.vanemery.com/Linux/Ramdisk/ramdisk.html
You might also want to check out tmpfs… there you can also specify the ramdisk size. The basic command is:
“mount -t tmpfs -o size=1G,nr_inodes=10k,mode=0700 tmpfs /space”
which will allow up to 1 GiB in RAM/swap with 10240 inodes and only accessible by the owner of the directory /space.
I use Firefox. I decided to use /dev/shm instead. The setup seems to work pretty good. Flash seems faster, although it’s not quite as fast when using the Flashblock plugin. The plugin stops flash from playing automatically when a page is loaded. The slow response really comes when there are 3 or 4 instances of Flash on one page. The plugin comes with a play button. You can pick and choose which flash instance you want to run.