I was reminded about the flash.sampler API by Grant Skinner’s recent post about it. While only available in the debug player, it can still tell us some valuable information about what goes on in the release player. Today I’m using the getSize function to find out how much memory overhead various classes impose, even when they are empty.
Posts Tagged memory
Weak References
Sep 30
Weak key support in the Dictionary class is one of those rarely-used features that can be greatly useful on occasion. This is the only place in the Flash API where weak references are used. In Java, there is another useful class for when you just want to make one weak reference, not a whole table of them: the aptly-named WeakReference class. Below is my own implementation, which is both simple and useful.
Free Lists
Sep 16
The garbage collector (GC) in Flash Player 9 and 10 is a notorious source of performance problems. This is caught in the Flex Builder profiler as [mark] and [reap] steps as the GC marks objects to free and then actually frees them. Additionally, the actual allocation of new objects is slow. Today’s question asks “can we improve performance by managing some of our own memory?” This article shows one way to take a little control of memory management. (SPOILER: this technique can yield a 2100% speedup!)
