A flex app is becoming very slow when deployed on a virtual (vmware) Red Hat 5.5 server (SAN storage)
If I serve a static file with Apache on this web server, this file is downloaded very fast. But the (pre)loading of the flex app on the same webserver is very slow. What could be the reason for this?
The flash application is doing something that takes time. If the connection speed was the bottleneck, you wouldn't even see the preloader; you'd see your browser loading your SWF.
A Static web page is going to be very small. ( ~10K or so at the largest, right? ). A Flex Application will probably be 4x that if you're using RSLs and 50 times that if you aren't. The initial load time will always take longer for a Flex app than a static web page.
In theory you make it up during the application's use because you don't have a lot of back and forth loading lots of repeat assets or data.
If you have confirmed that the slow part is after the SWF has loaded, then your problem is likely in your code. There is probably too much happening on startup. Possible too many children being created. You should use deferred instantiation and maybe Flex Modules to reduce the startup time. You can also run the Flash Builder profiler on the app to see what is taking so much time.