Try to access the page : http://thomsonreuters.com

The Flash animation will raise the CPU utilisation to 90-95% on a single CPU
system.
Regardless the browser, IE, Netscape, Firefox, etc ... regardless the
Operating system.

Why is this animation taking so much CPU process power on a single CPU PC ?
You will not have the effect on a dual core, quad core, etc.

Any special overhead by the Flash-Player for multiprocessor context switching
on a single cpu ?

Thanks for feedback

My initial guess was that it has to do with the way those dots are coded to
work. To create the various different 3D shapes, and have them rotate.

I was intrigued, so I downloaded and opened the SWF in my decompiler to see if
I could notice anything straight off. On a quick browse of the code I found
quite a few VERY LARGE if statements. Some nested inside of while loops. This
is probably where the processor intensiveness is coming from. It takes a lot
of processing power to go through large if/else statements, and to do it
recursively in a loop magnifies that quite a bit. I would consider re-coding
this to work a bit differently.

I would have to get the original source from you and go through it
line-by-line to understand what is happening before I could give you more
detailed information on HOW to re-tool the code for optimization of the
processing power needed. I would need the original source because I never
trust the accuracy of a decompiler to truly give me exactly what was coded. I
have noticed differences with my own projects that I have decompiled.

It is strange that it would be happening only on single-core/single-processor
machines, and not with multiple cores. The multithreading support built in
seems to be taking care of using the processing cores efficiently. Interesting
note, I have a Hyperthreaded P4 on this machine. If you don't know what
hyperthreading is, its a technology that tells the OS that it is a dual-core,
despite being single-core, and mimicks some of the benefits of using a
multi-core processor, though not as good. On my computer the processing power
topped around 98% CPU usage, and held an average of around 40-60% usage
throughout having the page open.