Summary:  Flashplayer 10 sucks.  Use Flashplayer 9.

I have been building webslide presentations with lots of flash
animations in them ( made with www.swftools.org ) and have
been plagued with slow flash animations on my main laptop
( SL5 with ancient xorg 1.1.1 ).  A supposedly 10 second flash
animation was taking 36 seconds.  On a similar laptop running
Ubuntu 8.04 with a newer xorg 1.4.1, the animation was taking
11.4 seconds, nearly correct.  To fix the SL5 laptop, I was about
to load in a newer X server (with all the pain that implies).

While testing, I tried "glxgears", which renders 3 spinning gears
as fast as it can.  On both the Ubuntu and the SL5 laptops, it spun
reasonably fast, 750 frames a second.  Hmmm - maybe it isn't X ...

To make a long story short, the problem turned out to be that the
Ubuntu laptop was running Adobe Flash Plugin 9 and the SL5 laptop
was running the latest and allegedly greatest Flash Plugin 10.  
When I downgraded the SL5 laptop to version 9 (save those old RPMs,
kiddies, they aren't available on line anymore!) the animation sped
up from 36 to 10.8 seconds, slightly faster than the Ubuntu machine.

Well, there may be stuff out there that won't run with Flash Player
9.0 r124, but it works fine with the obvious stuff.  I still have
10 around, and I can symlink to it from a different instance of
firefox if needed.

Keith

P.S.  The pesky animation is here:
http://server-sky.com/slides/bridge2009jun16_1024/aposkew_pretty_D_orbit.html
http://snurl.com/l3f7e
Time the white row crossing the centerline, 5 turns and divide by 5.

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          [log in to unmask]         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs