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Thursday, February 17, 2011

My first sticky!

Okay, for those not in the know a sticky is a thread that gets positioned to the top of a section in a forum as it is a helpful thread that the community moderators believe should be kept visible for future readers.

I submitted this post to the City of Wonder forums today and it got stickied. It feels like being published for the second time. (Many thanks to my friend Craig for getting me published the first time.)

I found myself helping people and having to explain over and over again how to kill flashplayer to help them overcome memory leaks when playing flash games, so I took a moment and wrote up a post explaining the steps.

Here is that post for anyone who needs help getting rid of flashplayer memory leaks.

How to Force Exit Flash Player without Restarting your PC

Having Facebook post issues from a game? Can't send gifts, request help with building marvels, or travel to allies, opponents, or between your capital and colony?

Is your game slowing down and shortly after reloading the issues are back?

Sometimes it is simply time to reboot your computer. Let's face it no operating system is perfect and eventually memory leaks and fragmentation will require a restart of the user environment (logoff, log back on) or a complete shutdown to poweroff state, count to 10, then turn it back on. It just depends on what service or program is being affected.

Most of the time, however it's just Flash player that needs to be restarted. One would think that closing their browser window that has the flash game in it would close flash. Unfortunately, most browsers use one flash instance for all their tabs including Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Why it is done this way is beyond me and I wish they'd start providing each tab their own separate instance of flash. The other problem is that even if you completely close every last tab of your browser sometimes the flash plug-in remains loaded and when you restart your browser you are right back to using the "broken" instance of flash that was giving you problems to being with.

Thus, you have two options left at this point. You can either force flash to completely exit or you can restart your computer. Force exit is much faster than rebooting, so here are the steps to save you time. There are different steps for each browser.

Chrome
Method A
1. Click in the address box.
2. Press SHIFT+ESC
3. A "Task Manager - Google Chrome" window will open.
4. Scroll down and find "Plug-in Shockwave Flash" or similar and click to select it.
5. Click "End Process"
6. You will notice that all tabs using flash will report that flash has crashed. Now reload the page you need and flash will start up again.
Method B
1. Click on the wrench icon in the upper right corner of your browser.
2. Select Tools -> Task Manager
3. A "Task Manager - Google Chrome" window will open.
4. Scroll down and find "Plug-in Shockwave Flash" or similar and click to select it.
5. Click "End Process"
6. You will notice that all tabs using flash will report that flash has crashed. Now reload the page you need and flash will start up again.
Internet Explorer [all versions]
Unfortunately there is no browser tool built-in to even the latest IE (IE8) to show processes, so we have to go out to the good old windows task manager to start killing processes.
1. Close all Internet Explorer windows.
2. Launch Windows Task Manager using one of the following.
a. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC
b. Right-click on your Start bar (next to the Start button is a good spot) and select "Task Manager from the list.
c. Press Windows Key+R or Click Start->Run.
i. Type "taskmgr" in the run "Open" box and click "OK".
3. Click the Processes tab and select and "End Process" on any iexplore.exe processes you see running.
4. Relaunch IE.
FireFox
Method A
1. Click Tools -> Add Ons.
2. Select the Plugins icon.
3. Scroll down to Shockwave Flash.
4. Click "Disable".
5. Count to 10.
6. Click Enable.
7. Reload your page.
Method B
1. Install Process Explorer from Microsoft.
a. This is a task manager that shows much more information and detail about the processes running on your computer, including what directory a process is located, who it's parent process is, and MUCH more. I am never without it.
2. Launch Process Explorer, look for firefox.exe.
3. Click the + symbol in front of firefox, if it is not expanded and right-click "plugin-container.exe" and select "kill process".
4. Reload your web page.
Method C
1. Launch Windows Task Manager using one of the following.
a. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC
b. Right-click on your Start bar (next to the Start button is a good spot) and select "Task Manager from the list.
c. Press Windows Key+R or Click Start->Run.
i. Type "taskmgr" in the run "Open" box and click "OK".
3. Click the Processes tab then select and "End Process" on plugin-container.exe.
Opera
Method A
I am not 100% positive this method will restart the flash plug-in's environment, so I would appreciate feedback on your experience using this method.
1. Click Menu -> Page -> Developer Tools -> Plug-ins.
2. Find Shockwave Flash and Disable any and all version you find in the list.
3. Reload the game tab and note that it says to install flash.
4. Enable Shockwave Flash from the Plug-ins tab.
5. Reload the game tab again.
Method B
1. Exit Opera
2. Launch Windows Task Manager using one of the following.
a. Press CTRL+SHIFT+ESC
b. Right-click on your Start bar (next to the Start button is a good spot) and select "Task Manager from the list.
c. Press Windows Key+R or Click Start->Run.
i. Type "taskmgr" in the run "Open" box and click "OK".
3. Click the Processes tab and select and "End Process" on any "Opera.exe" processes you see running.
4. Relaunch Opera and reload the game.
Safari on the Mac
For Mac users using Safari, use the following link to help you simply restart Flash.
http://hints.macworld.com/article.ph...00920113426884
Gotta love Linux! My native environment. :0)