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Macromedia Flex Profiler: Identifying Performance Bottlenecks in ActionScript


Clement Wong

Clement Wong

Macromedia, Inc.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. The ActionScript Profiler Architecture
  3. What Does the ActionScript Profiler Do?
  4. Installing the ActionScript Profiler
  5. Running the Profiler: An Example
  6. Troubleshooting the ActionScript Profiler
  7. Some Final Thoughts
Comments
Created:
14 June 2004
User Level:
All

Experience matters, but so does performance! It is not easy for software developers to produce optimized code the first time they write a new piece of software. Software developers often worry more about usage scenarios, design, implementation details, bug fixes, and looming project deadlines. Performance analysis and optimization are considered as nice-to-have steps, or, are the absolute last steps in the development process for some developers—if they ever get a chance to do them at all.

Sometimes, optimization occurs so late in the product development cycle that it risks destabilizing the software. Also, software developers often fail to predict performance bottlenecks and waste time optimizing methods that are expensive but used infrequently. While performance analysis can be as simple as using timing calls that help identify bottlenecks in code in simple cases (for example, using the System.currentTimeMillis() function in Java and the GetTimer() function in ActionScript), this technique quickly becomes ineffective as the amount of code increases. All of these factors contribute to making performance analysis and optimization steps unpopular among software developers.

Performance profiling software addresses these problems. There are many successful performance profiling tools in the market for popular programming languages such as C/C++ and Java, but there are none for ActionScript. Macromedia Flex offers a familiar, standards-based programming framework for creating rich, responsive enterprise Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Because MXML, the Macromedia Flex Markup Language, and ActionScript programming play a major role in Flex application development, the Flex development team realized that developers needed an easy-to-use performance profiling tool for ActionScript. Without it, they knew that developers would have a difficult time implementing an efficient application model framework and doing performance analysis on their code. Therefore, in the early stages of Flex product development, the Flex team built an ActionScript profiler for their internal use and, eventually, they included the ActionScript Profiler as part of Macromedia Flex. In this article, I explain the ActionScript Profiler architecture, installation, configuration, and usage.

Requirements

To complete this tutorial you will need to install the following software and files:

Macromedia Flex

Learn more about Macromedia Flex.

Tutorials and sample files:


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About the author

Clement Wong is a principal software engineer at Macromedia. He joined Live Software in 1998 and became a Macromedia employee after the Allaire acquisition in 2001. He has worked on CF_Anywhere, JRun, ColdFusion MX, and Flex over the past six years. Prior to 1998, he lived in Toronto and worked as a professional engineer in the field of remote sensing.