Since I started playing CoTLI 20 days ago I can't help but notice the non-stop complaining about the game performance in chat; whether it be on Steam, Kong, Games.com, AG, or Facebook. In my opinion, poor performance is not the fault of the developers. It's not about what software they code the game in, or what platform it is run on etc. It's not because "flash sucks". It's about your computer, most important how current your hardware drivers are and how well you maintain your system software. As proof I have done a test on my own accord. Below I'll describe what I did and provide a screenshot for visual reference.

I currently have separate games going on all five instances; meaning none of them are linked, each an individual game. For this "test" I opened up all 5 games at the same time and let them run a while. So, I have the Steam client open running the Steam-based version. Then I have Chrome running with 4 tabs open each with its own game running on each of the 4 sites CoTLI can be played on.

Here is a snapshot of my system resources with all these going at the same time:

http://i.imgur.com/ULJRCig.png

As you can see my computer is barely being taxed even with 5 instances of CoTLI running. I in fact have them all going like this very frequently so I can keep an eye on each game at a moments notice. While these are running I am still able to use my system as I normally would without them running. I'll run other Steam games while these run in the background without a single issue. I don't ever experience slowdowns or lag or any other issue in any of the CoTLI instances while I play them. I've left them all running 2+ days in same cases, and never run into any problems. Sure the longer they stay running the more memory they consume, but even when they reach well over 1,500,000 KB (500,000 KB Steam + 1,000,000 KB Chrome) combined they all still run smoothly.

For those curious, here are my system specifications:

Alienware 14 gaming laptop (mid-2013 gen.)
Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-bit
Intel Core i7-4700MQ (4th gen.) processor (6MB Cache, up to 3.4GHz) [4 cores, 8 threads]
Samsung 8GB Dual Channel DDR3L memory at 1600MHz (1.35V)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 750M dedicated GPU with 1GB GDDR5 dedicated memory
Intel HD Graphics 4600 integrated GPU
14" WLED FHD (1920 x 1080) Anti-Glare display
WD Black 750GB SATA 3Gb/s (7,200 RPM, 16MB Cache) hard drive

Note that any instance of CoTLI I run uses solely the integrated Intel GPU. Running them on the nVidia GPU provides zero performance increase or benefit in my case.

Most importantly though is that I meticulously maintain my computer. I always run current, stable, device drivers. I also always make sure Windows is properly maintained and optimally configured. No unnecessary services running, no unnecessary system startup programs, no unnecessary background taskes, no "bloatware", etc etc.

I realize people might read this and in response tell me I'm full of crap and don't know what I'm talking about. Or that my test is pointless and my results mean nothing. That they're computer is perfectly fine and up-to-date and they still have problems. I'm sure people will still say it's CNE's fault and/or because it's a flash-based game.

My opinion is that if your computer is running at least a dual-core processor (of any variety) and at least 4 MB of memory and is properly maintained and configured with up-to-date software, you should have ZERO issues running CoTLI on any of the platforms.

Anyway, feel free to flame me, I'll understand. :)

I decided to do even further testing and run an instance of CoTLI (Facebook edition) on an old Sony Vaio laptop with very basic specs. It's running Windows 7 SP1 64-bit on an Intel Pentium Dual-Core T4300 @ 2.10 GHz w/ 4 GB memory. This system is quite old with old outdated hardware. However, this computer is well maintained as I talked about in my original post.

I'm able to run the game just fine without issue since I've had it going. It's of course not as smooth as my main computer. It's using on average 53% of the CPU while running. Yes, a large chunk but that is because of a seriously outdated processor. Memory usage is similar to what I've seen on my main computer, starts out low (160-180k KB (ish)) and slowly increases over time.

My point is, even on this old computer CoTLI runs perfectly fine without issue even with bare-minimum specs. It's even running a Intel GMA GPU, very very old with very low capabilities.

I really do think it comes down to how well a systems software is configured and optimized.

@Supervised: Flash has always and is well known to handle memory resources poorly. It's not the fault of CNE other than them choosing to use Flash as the platform for the game. CoTLI does not have a memory leak, instead, Flash handles memory poorly and does a horrible job of releasing memory. It's nothing a quick restart of the game wont fix though.