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476

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My Flex web application is almost ready for launch. I'm currently optimizing as much as I can in order to make sure even low-end clients are able to run it fluently. The problem is, I have no idea where to optimize more than I've already optimized.

My question is, what are the usuals suspects regarding bottlenecks? What tips and experiences do you have when it comes to Optimizing a Flex app?

+3  A: 

There are some web tutorials on this, this presentation looks helpful. And of course, the Flex profiler could help you identifying the bottlenecks.

schnaader
+1  A: 

That's a good presentation covering a lot of pitfalls. Another thing I can think of is over-usage of bindings in large applications. They're easy to create and forget, silently generating a lot extra code running in the background, and are especially potent when used carelessly on entire classes.

Stiggler
+1  A: 

These are some of the things I've seen that cause slow downs. I've only worked with one or two Flex developers, so I don't know if this is obvious, or helpful. Either way:

  • Transparency: Whenever views have a lot of components with non-opaque transparency (i.e. alpha less than 1.0), these views tend to be extremely slow, especially on older machines.
  • Object Creation: It seems that whenever there is a lot of object creation happening, the app slows to a crawl, even on newer machines. I worked on an app that created at least a few hundred objects when the application started.
  • Data Fetching: Whenever data is loaded asynchronously, the app will take a performance hit depending on how much is loaded
  • Lots of objects: When views have lots of objects in them, they tend to lag and generally drag ass.

Those are the ones I remember the best, having not worked on a major Flex app in over a year.

Hooray Im Helping
+1  A: 

Other than performance improvements you can optimize the file size of flex applications.That will definately improve user experience.I hope this article helps:
http://askmeflash.com/article/9/optimize-flex-swf-filesize-performance-loading

Bryson