Animated GIF takes a lot of CPU in IE.

[Robert Irvine]

Apologies if you have seen this post in other groups.

When using IE on my laptop, any large animated GIF ends up taking almost
all of the CPU to process it.
e.g<img
src="http://www.subaruforester.org/vbulletin/forums/images/bannerads/subarugenuineparts.gif"
width="468" height="60" border="0" ALT="">

Even if I download the .gif to the local drive, and adjust the html
accordingly, it still takes up all of the CPU on my laptop.

The CPU usage starts out very low (as you would expect) but climbs as
the GIF animation runs, until it hits 100%. When the animation loops
back to the start, the CPU usage drops to very low again, then builds.
This pattern repeats over and over again.

The laptop uses an Intel Celeron chipset (380) and does not have a
separate video card.

This does not happen if I show the animated GIF in the Fax and Picture
viewer. (CPU stays low for the entire execution of the animation)

This also happens on my two desktop machines, both with graphics cards.
The CPU usage only spikes to around 16%, but the same cyclic pattern of
CPU usage is evident. Again, it does not happen with Fax and Picture
Viewer.

Following some advise from somewhere on the web (can't remember where at
the moment. ;-( ) if you right-click on the animated gif, and choose
properties, then OK out of the properties dialog, the CPU spiking stops.
IE is then fine with animated GIFs until you close it and re-open it,
after which you see the excessive CPU usage again.

I've seen the occasional message on the web complaining of the same
thing, but there does not seem to be any fix.

Anyone have an explanation of this behaviour in IE. Or better yet, a
fix.

Rob.

 

[Chuck Davis]

Robert,

I've just opened the GIF in IE, Avant, Firefox and Opera. With all four the
CPU usage is 1%. I would look to other causes.

 

[Robert Irvine]

Any thoughts on where to look?

I should have said that I am running on XP SP2, with the latest updates
to XP and IE.

I only notice this in IE and you have to have 'play animations in web
pages' checked.

Other programs are fine with it. As noted, the quicker the machine,
(and if you have a graphics card) the effect is much reduced, and may
not be apparent.

Rob.

 

[Robert Irvine]

No fix yet, but the problem can be worked around (on my laptop at least) by
reducing the graphics hardware acceleration down one notch from 'full
acceleration'.

This is meant to disable cursor and bitmap acceleration. Whatever it does,
the animated GIFs no longer spike to 100% CPU, but stay down below 10%.

Rob.