Cpu-hungry Flash banners and the designers who love them

11 May Cpu-hungry Flash banners and the designers who love them

Apparently this site’s flash banner consumes alot of cpu cycles and might turn some people off. I work hard on my Flash and do all I can to ensure viewers have a positive experience on this site. I cannot overcome bias against Flash, I can only present and package it in a way that will hopefully reach the most people. To this end I have added a control set to the header to control the animation. The icons in the top-right of the banner will now let you can stop play, skip and return to other animations. This both serves as a platform to display animations and allows users to stop the animation, should it become annoying. To free up more cpu I have set the wmode properties of the flash from Transparent to Opaque, as research shows transparency also increases the cpu usage. Other optimizations include trimming file sizes down another 12kb. All things considered I have managed to bring the cpu consumption down from ~24-28% to ~13-22% when a user stops the animation.