It’s extremely common to see somebody ask a question about avoiding the garbage collector only to be answered with “just use a pool” as if that immediately and totally solved the problem. While pools will often keep the garbage collector at bay, they’ll also introduce a whole slew of new problems that you’ve got to deal with instead. Today’s article goes through several of these problems so you’ll be aware of the tradeoffs involved and hopefully avoid some pitfalls.
Posts Tagged object pool
Unity’s garbage collector is old and slow. As garbage from your scripts piles up, the garbage collector will eventually run. When it does, it runs all at once instead of spreading the work out over multiple frames. This means you get a big spike on one frame causing your game to momentarily freeze. One of the best ways to get around this is to use an “object pool” to reduce the number of objects eligible for garbage collection. After all, if there’s no garbage then there’s nothing to collect! For more on this strategy as well as a class you can use to implement it, read on!
AMF is great for serializing AS3 objects. Its compact binary format is far more efficient than XML or JSON and it’s just as easy to use: just call writeObject or readObject. However, there are many ways to make it even more efficient. Today’s article presents one more way that eliminates some overhead you might not have thought out. Read on to learn more and for a helper class that will enable you to avoid it.