If you are looking for a stable framerate, this workaround by Andre Michelle has done quite nicely for me:

http://blog.andre-michelle.com/2006/stable-fps-test/

The only downfall is that simply running that with eat up some CPU…

Tinic’s blog entry that Ryan referred to in the comments section explains the crux of the issue in nice, clear, Tinic prose. OS’s handle timeslicing differently and browsers add their own processing overhead (as well as garbage collection in the release/debug players and debug processing in the debug player) that all result in major frame rate undulation.

Nice app, btw.

Safari is very interesting, in that it chokes off plugins in pages in background tabs… links here:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/jd/archives/2007/02/browser_cycles.cfm

We can’t predict the processor we run on, and we can’t predict what else will be competing for that processor during rendering. If you’d like to try for one hundred redraws per second (100 fps), then you certainly can, but if you’d like to make sure all machines play at the same speed, then choosing maybe a dozen or two redraws per second gets more predictable.

jd/adobe

However, since I was able to exceed 24fps by setting the frameRate to 60 or 100, it might be possible to automatically increase the frame rate until the desired framerate is reached.
I imagine this will require some kind of process control algorithm . I’ll post again if I make any progress.

hey mims,

i ran your test files on my linux laptop (a dell with a 2ghz
processor, 1 gig ram running debian) and got fairly consistent
results.

on my firefox (fps don’t show on the browser because of the default
font is not being available on my machine, but you can see on the
console to the left the traces):

http://ranchonotorious.org/gabriel/mims/debian_iceweasel.png

the bumps on the framerate coincide to my bringing up the small prompt
to call the screenshot program.

and, for your collection of screenshots, a couple of screenshots of IE
6 and 5 (running over wine), which perform only very slightly
better(!):

http://ranchonotorious.org/gabriel/mims/debian_ie5.png
http://ranchonotorious.org/gabriel/mims/debian_ie6.png

i know this has absolutely nothing to do, but this made me remember a
long time ago when i worked making cheesy casino banners that there
was a limit per browser on gif animation rates. if i ran the gif on
a graphics program (i don’t remember which was it.. ), i could get it
to run as fast as my computer would go, but on browsers, i could only
get it to run up to a max frame rate. I know nothing of each
browsers’ inner mechanics, but i think that your bottleneck/weird
differences in fps could be caused by them, not by the player itself.
–
gabriel montagné láscaris comneno

Mims Wright over at dispatchEvent has a post about inconsistent framerates in the Flash Player and different browsers. He’s got some sample code and results for people to try out. Tinic Uro addressed this back before Player 9 was released, and hi…

My first guess is

1) your framerate is set too high and cpu cannot cope

2nd guess is

2) your cpu cannot cope because it is being restricted from doing so.

Most browsers (firefox being one of the major offenders) restrict processing time to its plugins. Its a major pain, but nothing much you can do. At least, if you do figure something out, do let me know yeh? Kudos mate.

Hope I helped.

Greetz Erik

Obviously the framerate is influenced by the components in the app. The graph updating takes up some CPU power, and it gets slower and slower as the graph contains more and more data points.