I play a few games and watch movies online that use flash (Shockwave Flash 10.3 r183) with Firefox (3.6.22). From time to time, flash gets horribly slow and I have to restart the browser (some time it seems that I actually need to wait a few minutes, for things to go back to normal)
This happens on my laptop (Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0, Intel Graphics Card), it only seems to affect the video portion (sound remains OK). Also, if I'm really patient, it seems to get better after a while. I have a much slower computer (Celeron 2.66Gh, 10 years old Nvidia card on AGP) with the same software, and the video is slower, but doesn't get slower after a while.
I've suspected that it's related to frequency scaling (some time the processor slows to 1.2 GH, so I've tried changing the governor to "performance" but it didn't seem to help.
I've suspected it's related to firefox using plugin-container, so I disabled that, but it didn't help.
I've done a strace of the plugin-container process, but nothing seemed out of place, top indicates that when the performance decreases the CPU jumps over 100%, I've searched for a profiling program but I didn't get very far.
Update I've updated flash to the latest version and the problem persists.
Does anyone have any idea how do I gather more information about this ? Where should I look ?
NOTE: This question is not about trying to solve the issue with the flash player, the question is about how to debug the issue and gather more information !