Flash banner performance

Often, when I work with many sites, some of the most impudent page takes up too much processor time, which is why the system slows down unpleasantly. Most often it turns out that the culprit is some tricky banner on Flash or a completely useless JavaScript prank that runs in the background.

I understand perfectly well that for a long time no one has been fighting for every clock cycle of the processor or bytes of RAM. Today, the amount of RAM is calculated in gigabytes, and you will not surprise anyone with a processor in a couple of gigahertz. This is probably right, because sometimes it’s cheaper to buy an extra gigabyte of RAM than to optimize. However, there must be some kind of rational framework.

Today I went to the Onliner forum, but literally after 15 seconds of reading the page, the whole system, along with the browser, slowly began to respond to my actions. The culprit was a small Flash banner at the top of each page. Attempts to use other browsers gave the expected result - it is generally impossible to use the site unless you turn off Flash or use the advertising filter. As the owners of the site allowed the placement of such a banner - I can’t imagine.



One such banner - and few of the users will return to your site. The above example, of course, is more an exception than a rule. Although a walk through sites with enabled measuring devices (in the form of Process Explorer) showed that spending 10-60% of the processor time of my Dual Core 2GHz on banners is in the order of things. The good news is that objects on inactive flash pages do not spend as much resources.



Maybe it’s worth site administrators to impose restrictions not only on the volume of the banner, but also on the resources it takes on client machines? Then the banner developers will be forced to optimize their work even a little, and users will have one less reason to set an advertising filter.