[Closed] STW Flash ads ate my computer

I sympathise. Those ads are wasting our cpu and electricity.

The browser locking up is a bit of a nuisance.

al.

Load firefox without the Flash gets rid of some of them but I only use it when I'm using the lapotop mobile otherwise I'm ok on my old setup as it's the video processing that hogs things.

I have had enough of the fan in my laptop in take off mode. So have just turned flash off, instant quiet. Cant be good for the advertisers though.

Installing ? also rids Hotmail of all the "I lost 400lbs of belly fat" ads and the associated nauseating pictures.

Yup the ads are utterly annoying. In activiyt monitor the site (safari) shows at using 9% of cpu, the flash just below 30%. All its doing is causing most of us to block ads completely stw and thus WHAT IS THE POINT.

just turned ?? on, no more irritating eyecatching charge adverts, bliss

Agree.

can we start a petition for just static adds on stw?

Judging by this and the thread the other day, a large number of the regulars on this forum use ?? because they have to otherwise it is unusable.

Presumably as similar number of new users are put off joining this excellent community because they don't know about ??and there computer goes mental whenever they visit.

But sadly the ads are how this forum is funded.

So it's all a bit of a quandry.

they can still charge for static adds! And then more of us wouldn't switch them off.

Alan - big thread on it the other day:
http://www.singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/is-anyone-elses-pc-getting-ragged-by-this-site

But, yes, this site with the ads on is unusable, so ads HAVE to come off. It's not even a question of morals, simply usability.

No ads, no forum.

The ads don't affect my quad core PC with 8gig etc but not everyone has access to that! My laptop struggles which is basic spec.

Maybe we could have a low bandwidth option?

Oh it'll need money to employ that-hence we need ads lol.

They do make the site snazzy though and strangley hypnotic...must buy...from..crc...hypno toad...

Yup this site makes my laptop battery life pretty rubbish. Not good really.

Main forum page is using 70% processor time on my mac book pro with the ad blocker off.
Ridiculous.

So, to me (as a web professional) it's pretty easy: every advertiser (CRC, Charge) sets up their full-bandwidth videos [u]and[/u] low bandwidth (static) equivalents. At the moment, CRC want me to know they have a sale. OK, an image will do it. Charge want me to know that they are cool. Again, show me a picture.

And then, give the user a choice, set it with a cookie. When I come in from my clockwork laptop, I get the low bandwidth site. When I view from my Cray, I see the videos. Everybody is happy.

Alternatively, send threatening email to everyone who takes the time to provide constructive criticism. Like what we all got today. Thanks.

Cheers, al.

Absolutely Al. The voice of reason.

I think some market research by STW over the target demographic might keep mag., advertisers and punters happy.

Just a thought.

*awaits threatening email*

simple people might find out about it!

[img] [/img]

Wouldn' us be wantin' that now wouldee

It's wierd how this site runs just fine on my phone, with all the ads running, even tho' the phone isn't Flash compatible. The only ad that doesn't display is Chain Reaction; I just get a bounding box with the name. So how come it's ok on a device with less than 60Mb of RAM but computers with Gb of RAM struggle? I'm really interested as to why as I'm no computer wizz, and I don't understand.

The only ad that doesn't display is Chain Reaction; I just get a bounding box with the name.

you've answered your own question there.

Anyway, as shown in the other thread, its not necessarily the hardware capacity of the device thats the limitation, there is something in having high bandwidth flash ads that disagrees with some combination of setups (OS, Graphic Card, RAM, Cache, Browser software, Browser release, flash release etc etc).

But it shouldnt. If it were one or two setups, then you can blame the user, when it's many, many, more as evidenced in the posts on recent threads (extrapolating to user base here, obviously) then its a serious failure on the website publisher.

The CRC and Charge ads are really annoying, and make my fans on my PC spin up. Please STW, this is not a bunch of wingers asking you to cut off your income stream, its just a bunch of STW users asking whoever designs the ads to take some account of processor load.

i'd pay a little extra in my subs for an ad free version when i'm logged in to make up the difference

No problem here. 4 year old PC with 2gb of ram, 128gb graphics card and a 3gig processor. CPU usage is only 12-18% but I agree it can be annoying for some. I found older versions of Firefox to be worse.

I think CHB has hit the nail on the head there - I think everyone realises the importance of the ads to STW as an income stream - I have used them when buying things and would continue to do so as do/will many others. However, I think it is fair that we as 'customers' can point out to the powers that be that the ads they are running are a) causing problems with smooth running of (often well specced) machines, (b) this is resulting in disgruntled users, and possible loss of revenue from said ads because people either block them* or deliberately wont click them as a form of protest, and (c) that this could be sorted fairly easily by either better coding/less intensive images/movies coming from the guys who develop the ads. After all guys, keeping pretty loyal customers/fans happy can only be benificial to you in the long run and just simply makes just business sense- revenue from said ads might go up, people are less whingey (maybe!) and everyone (you, us,your advertisers)is happy.

Incidently, I quite like the cotic thing down the side - think it would look better as \ [main page] / rather than / [ main page] /, but thats just me.

point II is - having upgraded my machine, site + ads runs better with a dual core rather than single core, but them I have 8gb ram and a clean install of win 7 etc (cf single core processor, 4gb ram and xp where it held everything up no end)

* not condoning blocking ads here, but it is a fact that people are doing it

* not condoning blocking ads here,

I [i]would[/i] condone the blocking of ads.
The alternative is a PC juddering to a halt.
No amount of faux sympathy for STW's ad income is going to make it any more acceptable to be forced to sit through the kind of effect the ads have on my PC.

it wasnt faux sympathy - just trying to see it from both sides*.

*written from a PC which I freely admit has ads blocked - it would probably die if the CRC ads were running, but as our work IT policy wont let us install flash on any machines then theres not a lot I can do about it and I get to see the benefits of the flash based ad free site.

The evans and wiggle ads arent flash, they catch they eye, are less irritating (both visually and on machine resources) why cant the CRC/charge ads be like that?

We are symapthetic to the problem and we've spent the last few days investigating what has been causing the high processor demands. It would indeed seem to be the Flash CRC ads that were the problem. They've now been changed and the processor demands on the machines here n the office have significantly dropped.

All our advertisers will be getting our new guidelines on ad production that gives details of the bench testing we will be doing on all ads before we put them live on the site. We have set up a test rig that consists of, well, a really shite computer and some old version browsers. If the ad doesn't ramp up the procesor on that machine more than a preset level then it passes. If not and it will get sent back to the advertiser for a diet.

Sorry if our site has been causing your machines to run hot. Hopefully we can avoid that happening again in the future.

thanks Mark.

*tentatively reaches for the Adblocker "off" button*

Brilliant. Good work Mark. Will check out the site on my shonky laptop at the weekend and see what happens. Thanks for taking our concerns seriously.

Thanks Mark.

thanks Mark, glad you're listening and acting upon it 🙂

Many Thanks! Glad to have helped in my small way 😉

A quick test: no ads (won't say how?!?), Firefox CPU == 6%

Turn on ads, Firefox CPU == 60%

So, that's much better than my previous browser-freezing 90-95% but still quite a lot. Leaves enough overhead for the browser to function which is the important thing.

Cheers, al.

Great - cheers Mark.

I've now had to turn the heating on in my dining room since you fixed this problem, can we have them back please.

having gently turned off the adblocker, I cant say Im overly impressed with any changes CRC might have made.

As al says, my CPU burn-up may have dropped, but it's only to 30% from 60%+

Im supposed to be browsing a forum, not rendering for Pixar. How can you have it thrashing so much. It doesnt happen on other sites I visit...

Cant CRC use animated gifs or something?

Nothing wrong with the new CRC ads Stoner, they are nice and light, 8% CPU on this ancient machine. Okay, not using flash at all could drop that still further, but that isn't likely to happen. Charge Ad takes 24% for comparison, so the new CRC ads far less trouble than that.

Sorry, I paid for the CPU in my machine so I get to choose what it does and CPU hungry Flash adverts are not something I want eating into the machines resources whilst browsing the STW forums. Adverts fine by me but stealing CPU cycles is just that.

Having an old or new system doesn't necessarily determine the impact on cpu utilisation these ads have. It's as much to do with how well the graphics driver can render the output.

An old PC with an old gfx card with a well written driver with good hardware support in the kernel will have lower overhead than a modern gfx card in a modern computer with a crappily written driver that requires the cpu to assist the gfx hardware in rendering the output.

Drac - Member

I've now had to turn the heating on in my dining room since you fixed this problem, can we have them back please.

that is the first time I ever have chuckled at a computer/IT joke. I must be spending too much time on here.

Grahamb: You're no-doubt correct. But like for example IE6 CSS compatibility, the fact of inefficient hardware/software combinations is out there and your users aren't upgrading. So, you have to have a couple of versions at least. Many sites now have a 'mobile' version, and for old PCs that's great.

How about http://m.singletrackworld.com (doesn't exist, don't click it!) with minimal everything, that can be used on a little screen or on a crap old PC.

Same idea as http://m.traintimes.org.uk/ vs http://www.traintimes.org.uk/

al.

http://m.singletrackworld.com sounds good. As I do most of my browsing on this site on my phone, a version that is more efficient works for me. Having said that, compared to the shonky STW of old, this is a joy to use. No instructions to go ride 'cos the site's fallen over [i]again[/i]. 😈

cpu down at around 20% now which is great, still hate the charge ads though, I don't want videos playing on the screen when i'm at work 😡

I do a lot of my browsing of STW on my phone too, but I find it perfectly usable as it is. My phone doesn't render any of the flash adverts anyway, so a mobile-lite version wouldn't make much difference. 🙂

cpu down at around 20% now which is great,

hardly.

That's like saying Im pleased to only get punched once in the face, because its less than five times.

As Graham does, I browse on my mobile a lot which is fine as it doesnt render flash ads. I also browse on my netbook which survives despite running a chunk of CPU on flash ads - but being an Atom chip I dont have much spare CPU cycles so if I want to have ANY other app open, flash needs to be off. My desktop though just doesnt like them (and we've covered hardware in a previous thread) and so if I want to keep the fans off and CPU for more useful business like ripping music/DVD/running models/playing spotify* then flash ads still have to be turned off.

* i.e stuff [b][u]I[/b][/u] choose for it to do, not some web designer

still grumpy stoner? i'll take 20% on a G4 ibook which must be about 4 years old.

* i.e stuff I choose for it to do, not some web designer

ps. you have a choice to visit this site too*

* I hate the video ads too though.

I have a choice to turn flash ads off as well.

which leads to an interesting proposition:
"Is it more immoral to visit the site with flash ads off but viewing the remaining static ads OR to boycott the site alltogether (RSS feed permitted maybe? 🙂 ) so not viewing any adverts, Flash or static?"

[quote http://m.singletrackworld.com sounds good.

Yup

"Is it more immoral to visit the site with flash ads off but viewing the remaining static ads OR to boycott the site alltogether (RSS feed permitted maybe? ) so not viewing any adverts, Flash or static?"

does 'morality' come into it ? I'm finding it hard not to read your 2nd option as being that it might be immoral not to view the adverts, even if you didn't consume any of the site's resouces, which seems bizarre. If we're talking morals, might one not ask is it moral to:
a) induce people to spend more than they can afford on things they don't actually [b]need[/b] ?
b) consume more extra electricity in their computer than the revenue incurred ?

A.C.Grayling I aint. 😉

I still want the CPU volume on these flash ads turning down before I turn them back on again.

Any nerdy types care to speculate on the cost of the extra CPU consumption on electricity costs etc 😉

ballpark figure for PC consumption 200W = ~2p/hour, so 50% usage would be 1p/hr

depending on clock speed and load differences it looks like the ads may be using anywhere between 50 and 100W
🙂
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/computer-power-consumption.html

down with flash

fight tha powah

How does one find out the consumption of an Intel mac using the site?

Get kill-a-watt or cheap knock off from aldi.

deadlydarcy, type activity monitor into finder and open the app. There should be something called Flashplayer for safari, probably using most of your CPU!!!!

Nope, safari not using anymore than 5% of my CPU

Safari on the macbook uses 10% of cpu without ads, 20% + with. The old ibook however just can't handle the ads at all.
4GB of ram helps the macbook somewhat.

kiwijohn, I figured you couldn't be right as when i checked yesterday on my old G4 ibook, 1.3GHz with 512MB RAM, STW uses just 20%. I just double checked and when i'm scrolled down (no flash visible on the page) its at about 20-30%, then if i scroll back up so that I can see the ads its at 60-70%. Still perfectly usable although This machine doesn't have much crap on it clogging things up, it just gets used for the internet. ps thats in firefox, haven't used safari in ages.

My ibook is an older 800MHz with 640MB of ram. It's also stripped back for just web surfing. Turning on the ads does make it more sluggish.
On the macbook, it drives the cpu temp into the 70's, sitting on 40 now. That can't be good.

Brill, somebody has fixed the laggy scrolling caused by the background image!

Thanks whoever did that! 🙂

woohoo...

hand't noticed...since it's turned off.

Anyway, back to the meat of it...are we going to end up with an impasse that says STW towers are happy with, say 20% of the average machine's CPU time being taken up with handling their flash ads and sodthelotofyoucozyou'lljustblockitifitsanissue...or will we ever see a sea change that moves STW ad styles away from flash and back to a benign forum environment that doesnt rape the planet?

Weird now mine is using about 6% for safari and 7% for flash palyer...could it be the new crc advert??

My laptop battery life has just seen a huge improvement - not saying why. 🙂

Is it just me or have a lot of the ads simply disappeared now? I never turn them off, they are useful links sometimes... 🙂

Oh, this is still rolling! So, my (latest) tuppence: "The Web" has been a request/response thang since the beginning (call it Web 1.0). You request a resource via a URL (a web page, ie some HTML) and it in turn includes some resources (images, later came javascript, later came CSS). This is rendered to be usable. And that's it. You read, scroll, click to the next page.

Then Web 2.0/AJAX/etc came along and we can do stuff on the page with little requests firing in the background, with useful results - also via HTML, JS, CSS but with XMLHTTPRequest. This is Flickr, Google Docs etc. This is basically an app and I'm happy to use CPU to power it.

And then there's entertainment media, such as last.fm, YouTube, iplayer etc. I get the page, it loads a flash player and streams media, I watch. Again, I am happy to use CPU.

And then there's STW. A basic Web 1.0 app but with blimmin useless media whose sole purpose is to attract/distract me. But seeing as it's a highly specialist site with many repeat visitors, flashy Flash ain't going to swing it. It has no advantage. It's just an overhead for the user. It puts people off.

So: Comments in this thread are either "my computer's fine, I'm happy and (by inference) wouldn't click on a low-CPU page version button in my preferences if it existed" and those who say "You either provide a low-CPU version I can select in my preferences when logged on, or I have to block ads - I have no choice you're eating my CPU".

Go on Go on Go on Go on Go on Go on Go on....

Cheers, al.

Dragging this up again, [url= http://rentzsch.github.com/clicktoflash/ ]Click to flash[/url] for safari, to just kill the evil flash. You can still click on the ads if you wish.

thanks Kiwijohn!! 🙂