I’ve posted a lot of articles about AS3 performance on this site. As a result of coding for Adobe’s Flash Player VM, all of these numbers may have changed with the release of Flash Player 10.1 and its attendant optimizations.

Introduction

All tests below are compiled with MXMLC 4.0. They are run on a 3.0 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo with the release version of Flash Player 10.1 on Windows XP. No changes were made to the original tests so the performance results can be directly compared.

Free Lists

Original Article

Flash Player 10.0 Performance:

Approach Unallocated Pre-allocated
Vector 88 12
Direct 74 126
Linked List 83 6
Linked List (recycling nodes) 88 33

Flash Player 10.1 Performance

Approach Unallocated Pre-allocated
Vector 34 12
Direct 26 65
Linked List 31 6
Linked List (recycling nodes) 33 35

Here we see a 2-3x performance improvement in the allocation of objects, but barely any improvement in the pre-allocation versions. As a result, the benefits of pre-allocation are reduced from ~13x to 5x. This is still a dramatic speedup! It’s also good to see the overall improvement in object allocation as most programmers don’t want to implement a pre-allocation scheme and, really, shouldn’t need to in the first place.

Namespaces As Function Pointers

Original Article

Explicit Namespace Namespace Variable No Namespace
Flash Player 10.0 113 4745 112
Flash Player 10.1 80 5285 80

This test shows a modest (25%) performance decrease in performance with the Namespace variable, but a hefty (40%) performance increase in regular variable access. Since regular variable access is by far more common than access through a Namespace variable, this is a big win on the whole.

XOR Swap

Original Article

Assign Swap XOR Swap
Flash Player 10.0 236 276
Flash Player 10.1 236 270

While the XOR swap is a tiny (2%) bit faster, these numbers are essentially the same.

Runnables as Function Pointers

Original Article

Function Object Runnable Direct
Flash Player 10.0 613 43 41
Flash Player 10.1 178 64 59

Firstly, calling via a Function object is ~3.5x faster! This should particularly impact the performance gains made by signal libraries like TurboSignals. Further impacting TurboSignals is the 49% drop in performance for calls through runnables. This is very sad as calls to an object’s methods is the bread and butter of AS3′s object-oriented system. Perhaps even more core to AS3 is direct function calls, which suffer a 43% performance hit. Overall, this category of tests seem to show a big loss of performance.

Loop Speed

Original Article

Flash Player 10.0 Performance:

Collection For-each For-in For
Array 377 8730 203
Fixed Vector 455 8983 105
Variable Vector 448 8940 104
Object 721 8805 592
Dictionary (strong keys) 652 8816 487
Dictionary (weak keys) 666 8884 487
BMD w/ alpha getPixel32 n/a n/a 290
BMD w/o alpha getPixel32 n/a n/a 222
BMD w/ alpha getPixel n/a n/a 300
BMD w/o alpha getPixel n/a n/a 228

Flash Player 10.1 Performance:

Collection For-each For-in For
Array 186 4424 76
Fixed Vector 239 4545 66
Variable Vector 238 4477 66
Object 498 4418 246
Dictionary (strong keys) 465 4568 250
Dictionary (weak keys) 558 4645 255
BMD w/ alpha getPixel32 n/a n/a 181
BMD w/o alpha getPixel32 n/a n/a 160
BMD w/ alpha getPixel n/a n/a 182
BMD w/o alpha getPixel n/a n/a 157

Most of these numbers show a performance increase of roughly 100%! There are some exceptions, but even these were decent speed boosts.

More To Come

This ends the first part of the series. I’ll reserve any general conclusions until the series has concluded, but for now I have to say that performance is mostly looking up. Having already done a very high-level test in my recent AS3 vs. JavaScript performance test followup and found a 1.66x speedup in 10.1, it looks like the numbers are agreeing. What we’re seeing in this series is a much closer look into how that speedup came about. Stay tuned for part two!