Profiling existing flash files

Question

I'm trying to do some research on flash objects in browsers. For example memory usage etc. With Adobe Flex Builder 3 im trying to do some profiling on swf files but the problem is that I can only do this on debug swfs. Almost all adds/games/video are release version. Is there a way to some testing on those?

Answer 1

I would say you will need to get the source. You could try a decompiler.

Answer 2

Look at the flash.sampler. You will need to run your content in the debugging version of the Flash player, but the content itself doesn't need to have been compiled with debugging symbols.

You can use the PreloadSWF option to inject an agent that can monitor. If you just want memory usage, that's a cheap API to call.

Answer 3

There's a similar question, posting in here too as it's just as relevant in this thread:

It's important to note that the Flash Player implementation is different on each platform and to an extent each browser, so expect notable speed differences. So if you're developing a resource intensive application you should be using profiling tools specific to each OS you're targeting, like for example Instruments on OS X and of course test the performance in each browser.