How to track down performance holes?

[spoco2]

Hi all,

We have a very large app running in Laszlo that we've been developing for a long time, it's about to go into beta, so we're in performance tuning mode. Now there are instances where the app crawls and seems to be churning away doing stuff, but with such a large app with many things going on it can be hard to work out where the CPU usage is going.

Does anyone know of a Laszlo or Flash inspector that would be able to show what things are actually using the CPU? Kind of like a task manager for Laszlo?

Are there Debug commands or some methods one can use... it's usually not too hard to improve performance of things once we work out where the problem lies, it's just finding the problem that's the hard part.

Simon

[rcyeager]

I'm not aware of any tool like that.

Usually, runtime performance comes down to managing view instantiation wisely, such that only the minimum number of views really needed are instantiated at any one time. Use initstage "late" and "defer" whenever possible. I also break up large apps into dynamic libraries, but that's more to improve startup time.

Another area of runtime performance is data binding. Some of the base OpenLaszlo components are notoriously slow, like the base combobox. Using datapooling (and base components that use datapooling, like the datacombobox) is faster.

More performance tuning ideas:

http://www.openlaszlo.org/lps4/docs/developers/performance-tuning.html
http://wiki.openlaszlo.org/Performance_Optimization

Robert Yeager
http://www.qrowd.com
http://www.cooqy.com