Flash player memory usage Safari 5.1.7; OS X 10.7.4

Question

I've heard quite a bit about the relationship between Apple and Flash but since getting my laptop I've noticed that the two aren't getting along. While browsing the web (±4 tabs, 2 with music playing on youtube) I realised that my brand spanking new MBP was freezing up on me. I checked the activity monitor and noticed that I only had 18mb of RAM free, after checking the processes I found flash player was the culprit.
It was using a whopping 900+mb of RAM which is almost a fourth of the available memory. I closed the rest of my applications and freed up another 300mb but within about 5 minutes flash player had eaten up all of that as well. I'm not sure if this is considered a memory leak but I am pretty sure that this is not normal.
Any suggestions? My friend who uses Firefox also said he was facing the same problem, so I don't know if switching browser will help.
- Camel

Answer 1

I am having difficulty reproducing my trader desktop result using the blazeds sample application.  So either I was mistaken, or perhaps I have a newer version than what I tested with originally.
I can reproduce the issue with our Flex application on the latest release of the flash player.  Using chrome and 11.3.300.262 there is a noted increase in memory utilization of between 50-100MB/hour.  This is a real time messaging dashboard application that constantly updates prices displayed in charts and tickers using Adobe messaging.
On 11.2.2.144 on the same installation of chrome this application reaches an initial memory utilization and then stays at or close to that memory level indefinitely - though memory usage will increase slightly as more and more data points are added to the charts displayed - nothing like 50-100MB/hour.
I would need to give your people access to our application as it's not publicly accessible.  So again, please contact me - flashbug at vanderberg.fastmail.fm to arrange those details.