|
|
|
looking down for a moment
Wednesday, April 10 2002
Gretchen caught a flight to San Francisco today so she could attend the wedding of the brother of her childhood friend Dina. For her part, Dina, who is an AP correspondent in South Africa, had to fly half way around the world to get there.
In the ongoing jihad to improve the efficiency of my new flash-based Chat client, I've discovered something interesting. Flash timelines with lots of layers consume gobs of CPU power, even if those layers have nothing changing in them. By moving my server polling loop off of the main timeline and removing all but one of the main timeline's frames, I was able to reduce CPU usage by at least 80%. Better still, there is no longer any evidence of CPU usage creep by the client. It takes a 2-10% fraction of CPU and doesn't step outside it except for extreme situations.
For all the web information about Flash (which, admittedly, tends to be spottier than the documentation of other technologies I use), there is essentially none discussing the subject of minimizing the CPU drag of Flash animations. Indeed, in examining the works of the web's Flash virtuosos, I see most of these consume at least 10% of my 800 MHz CPU's power. This page at Moock.org eats 70% of my CPU without apologies. A site that purports to be about Flash-based web design eats up 80% of my CPU for the first fifteen seconds I'm on their page. I did find a Flash-based chat (created by Pipey.com) that only burns about as much CPU as my chat, but it is both simpler and slower.
Tonight when I took Sally to Prospect Park, the bluish spotlight beams representing the vanished World Trade Center were still on, though I knew they were going to be turned off promptly at eleven o'clock. Since it was nearly that time when I'd last checked, I stood in a strip of woods staring at them, hoping to be watching at the very moment they were extinguished. I also had to pee, though, and when I looked down for a moment to find my fly (not that a gentleman needs to look to find his fly), I picked the worst possible instant, because when I looked back up, the monument of photons had vanished.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?020410 feedback
previous | next |
