Flash

[Jon Nettleton]

>
>> What are the specs on the desktop?
>
> Twin-core Opteron running at 2.6 GHz.  However, 'top' shows no more than
> 5% of one core being used by Firefox+plugin while rendering that video clip.
>

Sounds like you are running an nvidia GPU with the proprietary
drivers.  As of flash 10.2, VDPAU is supported for flash video
decoding.  This offloads virtually all the processing to the gpu.  Of
course this is also entirely proprietary and only Nvidia's proprietary
drivers support it.

Ultimately flash is a proprietary system, so there is only so much we
can do to make it run better.  My recommended solution for
youtube/vimeo is the flash video replacer video plugin.

Again from my basic testing, the big killer with flash on an XO is the
limited cpu cache.

-jon