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Flash player and network homes on Mac OS 10.5+

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So, along the lines of my previous post, today I decided to look into Flash Player performance on 10.5 clients with a 10.5.8 server, using network home directories.

I had noticed a couple days ago that users playing youtube videos got occasional skips and stops in the video. This is on a brand new Intel iMac, with 2gb of ram. It should easily be able to handle a non-full screen, non-HD youtube video. Doing a `fs_usage AppleFileServer | grep <username>` (where <username> is the username of the user logged in) on our AFP server showed a LOT of traffic to ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash Player/… First, seems like Adobe hasn’t touched that part of the Flash player code, if it’s still writing to a “Macromedia” folder. Second, why the hell is it caching information in the Preferences folder?! That’s what ~/Library/Caches is for (which I already redirect). But, I know there’s been a lot of complaining in the past about Flash caching data in non-standard places that aren’t affected by clearing the browser cache.

So, given that amount of traffic it was producing, I figured that was probably the cause (what a leap!), so, I open up the NHR scripts I use, and add a redirect for that folder to the local HD, and install those on the client. Guess what? No more Flash Player skips or stops on network home users.

At this point, I’ve copied those changes out to all our clients, and dropped them into our DeployStudio workflow (for machines that we image between now and the next image update). On the plus side, this should result in a sizable decrease in server IO and network traffic in the case of a whole class watching Flash videos.

So, once again, shoddy programming. The only caveat I can think with this would be any install bases that are using Macromedia Dreamweaver (already checked Dreamweaver CS3, and it doesn’t write to that folder), or maybe Macromedia Director. If you’re running those, I’d recommend just redirecting the “Flash Player” folder within the Macromedia folder. But, I’m not positive those other programs write to that folder, it’s just a guess.

So, good luck.

UPDATE: So, a student came up to me today and said Pandora stopped working. Looking into the issue, it looks like the newest full release of Flash doesn’t really like this “hack”. So, after beating my head against the wall for 2 hours with this, I decided “what the hell” and installed the beta of Flash player that adobe just released (which is Intel only, even though it claims to be a Universal Binary in the installer, and the Plugin itself), and what do you know, it fixed the issue. So, my guess at this point is Adobe is just slowly updating Macromedia’s code, and they found/fixed this issue while fixing something else (since they don’t support Network Homes).

Flash Professional CS 3, Version 9, and Network Homes (on a Mac)

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Or, “How I stopped worrying and realized Adobe seemingly has crappy QA” (Just because you don’t support something doesn’t mean you don’t test against it)

This is another note, but it’s mainly for those of us in the Sysadmin world. I’m posting it mainly because I couldn’t find anything myself on this.

Flash CS3, e.g. Version 9, does a bit of an odd thing when you launch it for the first time. It copies it’s configuration directory to the local user account. This is so users can tweak settings and not influence the primary copy that’s in the Application folder. The problem arises with Network Homes (which, Adobe doesn’t support). This folder is about 25MB, and contains a whopping 1100 files. Coping that many files, over the network, takes a bit of time (even on gigabit). So, when  a user first launches Flash CS3 on their account, the Flash CS3 window pops up, but there is no indication it’s doing anything. It just sits there, and begs to be “force quit”.

But, if you give it a few minutes (depending on your network and storage capacity), it’ll eventually continue loading. The bitch is that it doesn’t tell you what it’s doing.

What finally turned my onto this issue was this adobe page: Modifying the component files — Flash CS3 which shows you where those files are copied to.

Thankfully, after that initial copy, things work fine.

So, you may be saying “But, you could just mass copy out those files to the home directories”. And yeah, that’s true. Except we have 1600 user accounts. Which at 1100 files, that’s about 1.76 million files on the system, which I don’t really want to do. But it would probably work for some of you.

So, word to the wise… just wait for Flash CS3 to launch. It’ll take a bit, but it’ll work.

Over the winter break, I think I’m going to set up my NHR scripts (that I’ve modified from Jeff’s originals) to redirect that Flash folder. Sure, first launch of flash will be “slow” because it’s going to have to copy those files out each time someone launches Flash when they login, but at least it’ll get them off the network, and copying them locally is still a hell of a lot faster than copying them over the network.

UPDATE: I tried modifying the NHR scripts last week, and found that redirecting the Flash folder made very little difference, since copying 1100 files locally is still not a “fast” thing to do. So, at this point, I have removed the redirection of all the Adobe files in Application Support. Now, that first launch will be slow, but after that, Flash launches in about 10 seconds. Sure, that’s 1100 files for each user on the SAN, but at least Flash is usable.