Flash Insight
All my experimentation with Ubuntu has largely taken place on a fairly old PC. I’ve run Ubuntu on virtual machines using Microsoft’s Virtual PC and VMWare but the only physical implementation has taken place on a PC with an AMD Athlon XP 1800+ CPU and an Asus A7V8X motherboard with 512Mb of RAM. The CPU clock speed is 1.53Ghz which makes it about equal to a 2.0Ghz Pentium IV. The graphics card that I’m using the most modern feature: an nVidia FX 5500 256Mb AGP 8x TV-DVI. Ubuntu has a Sytem Monitor that allows you to look at the CPU usage in real time.
I activated this while running a YouTube video in Firefox. Even with no other applications running, the processing of this flash video utilised about 75% of the CPU’s resources. When I tried to two flash videos simultaneously, the system crashed almost instantly. Subsequent testing with just one window open in Firefox and one flash video running caused the browser to crash but not the system (which is what normally happens). Before the crash however, there were many spikes in the visual display that touched or almost touched the 100% ceiling, even though the maximum stated usage was 95%. I think what’s happening is that the CPU is simply being overtaxed and in turn this caused either the browser or system to crash. This is not an original idea and I’d seen it stated in one of the help forums but only tested the idea out recently. It may well be that there is nothing inherently unstable about Firefox and Flash running in Ubuntu, instead the instability is caused by the limitations of the hardware.
I’ve taken a bold step and installed Ubuntu on my Toshiba laptop, while still retaining my Windows Vista Business Edition. I’ve created a dual boot system and am currently experimenting with Ubuntu in this new environment. With the dual core processor that I have, the average CPU utilisation is about 25% for each core although when the video first started up there a single spike to 100% in one of the cores but the other core remained at about 50%. So far no crashes but I’ll keep testing and if the system holds up then the previously stated theory is very likely true and if I’m to ever have any peace on my other desktop computer, then I’ll need to upgrade the CPU and motherboard. Of course that will mean new, compatible RAM but Ubuntu is not very demanding in terms of memory use. With nothing running on my PC, it uses around 194Mb of the 512Mb available. That rises to 230Mb when Firefox is opened and so swap file is being used. It would seem likely that Ubuntu would run with just 256Mb of dedicated RAM available to it.
Getting back to my old Athlon XP 1800+, it was first released on October 9th, 2001, and boasted 256Kb of L2 cache. By contrast my current 2Ghz T7200 Intel Core2 CPU has a 4Mb L2 cache. If Firefox and Flash hold up under new configuration then I’ll probably upgrade the old desktop but not right now.
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