Performance :: Database Vs XML For Large Static Data?
Apr 7, 2012
I'm developing an application using Flas Builder / Flex for Adobe Air. This application will be processing a large set of static text (100 - 200 MB) using a variable set of processing instructions.The target platforms will be iOS, Android and Desktop.The data set can be either one large XML file or broken into a bunch of XML files about 3MB each.This will be decided at design time.From your experience would it be better to store the text in an Adode Air database or a set of XML files for best performance (including speed and battery life)?What other considerations should I take into account?
I'm devloping some library classes for flocking/steering behaviours on large numbers of objects (2000+). I'm finding that at < 500 instances, performance is reasonable. As the numbers increase, framerate bogs down.
I've seen remarkable performance with libraries such as Flint or Box2D with ridiculous #'s of particles / objects, so it should be possible to optimize / refactor my code to be a bit better.
I'm aware of the basic optimizations, such as bitwise operations and optimized for loops. Are there any more fundamental approaches I should be considering? For example, currently each instance is a vector-based MovieClip. Would working with BitmapData be more efficient?
i have a AS3/FL10 based application that renders/animates/filters (blur) large PNGs (1 per view) (about 1100x900 px, roughly 2mb). Due to the fact that the fans start spinning like crazy on my notebook, i wonder if this is considered "bad practise". Unfortunately i need transparent images, so JPG is not a choice. Additionally, the PNGs are loaded dynamically, so embedding the files to the flash file (for utilizing flash jpg compression) is not a choice either.
Background: I am using SQLite database in my flex application. Size of the database is 4 MB and have 5 tables which are
table 1 have 2500 records table 2 have 8700 records table 3 have 3000 records table 4 have 5000 records table 5 have 2000 records.
Problem: Whenever I run a select query on any table, it takes around (approx 50 seconds) to fetch data from database tables. This has made the application quite slow and unresponsive while it fetches the data from the table.
How can i improve the performance of the SQLite database so that the time taken to fetch the data from the tables is reduced?
i am pretty familiar with tweaking as1/as2 performancehowever in as3 i am still a noob concerning optimization.i tend to have a class utils in my projects in which i carry a lot of static vars and functions.[code]
I am working on an Adobe AIR (2.0) application that contains a feature to allow users to print documents (such as salary slips). Those documents are originally in PDF format. Due to circumstances we cannot directly display those PDFs in the AIR application (for example using flash.html.HTMLLoader). Therefore we convert the PDFs to SWFs (using the pdf2swf tool, see The SWFs are loaded into the application using a mx.controls.SWFLoader, like so:
I'm wondering if anyone has experience with if there is a big difference in performance in ActionScript 3 between keeping a class with only public static functions, and utilizing those functions often (as in a frame event at 30fps), and in turning the class into a "normal" class of which I instead make an instance and call the functions via the instance instead.
Looking for some recommendations on tools that can be used independent of the source (that is just on the swf) to check for Frames Per Second, total size and how often the movie loops.
Im not sure whats the best way is to make large amounts of data available to my android app on the local device.
For example records of food ingredients, in the 100's?
I have read and successfully created .db's using this tutorial.[url]...
However to populate the database I use flash? So this kind of defeats the purpose of it. No point in me shifting a massive array of data from flash to a sql database, when I could access the data direct from the as3 array?
So maybe I could create the .db with an external program? but then how would I include that .db in the apk file and then deploy it to users android device.
Or maybe I create a as3 class with an xml object init and use that as a means of data storage?
Are there javascript libraries that can handle large data visualization? I've seen Protovis, but not sure how much data it can handle. Also, how do Actionscript libraries compare to Javascript in terms of performance?More:I've tried Flare, but seems to be slow for my applictaion. Now I'm yet to figure out if it is the rendering or if it is the shaping of data for rendering. I am looking at interactive graphs like the JobVoyager.
how "you" would do it and then deciding my strategy from there.What I'm setting out to do is as follows:I have a UI with about 10 sliders and 10 buttons.I'm using Senoculars Virtual Mouse class to record all of the users interactions into arrays (basically [x,y, action, time, value]) and then after a decided time (say 3 minutes) I play the users interaction back to them.All of that works fine but now the data is not persistent.I would like to be able to store the interaction data somewhere and then a user can log out, log in and view their previously saved interaction.how would you go about saving this data? I was thinking about storing it in a XML file but I'm concerned that the file would wind up being ridiculously huge. If a user drags a slider from left to right just once thats saving [x ,y action, time,value] 42 times.
I'm currently using XML to import geo-location data to my flash application.Even though my XML scheme is about as small as can be, I still feel i would do better downloading the variables as text and exploding them. If i manage to change the xml to raw text I can compress the data to about 35% of the original size.I want to load the data in the form a_b_c_d-e_f_g_h.So, to the question; how do I explode a datastring in flash?
I'm building a sidescrolling world where you can move around.The idea is that you should be able to move to any point in the world, as well as travelling really fast.I'm pregenerating a long list of data about objects to place, their positions etc.
Now. When moving to a point far away from current position I don't want to loop through the whole list of objects to find what objects should be seen and not, so I'm thinking I should divide the position list into sections, each covering an area equal to the visible area. That way I would only have to roll through the lists closets to the new position.This would however result in an array of thousands of elements each consisting of about 20 objects and I'm figuring that might not be very healthy.One solution would be to split everything up further so that in the end I would have a handable nr of arrays containing a handable nr of elements.
You're probably thinking I should generate positions on the fly, but since one place in the world can be revisited I need to store all positions.
I've got a small problem with loadvars. I want to send data from Flash to PHP, which usually works well. But right now I need to send "larger" amounts of data around 10-20kb and loadvars doesn't work anymore.
Using loadvars to open browser-windows seems to work fine, but I want everything to happen inside of flash.
The code is:
Code: datastring = "1, 2, 3 (...) 4998, 4999, 5000"; // long text loadstring = 'save.php?data='+datastring; db = new LoadVars();
[Code].....
Works fine with small text, with big text nothing happens. How to do this the right way?
Edit: Loadvars seems to work up until 4050 characters, 4051 and it doesn't send anymore. But I can't really split the query..
I'm using a .swf to connect to a socket and stream data as fast as possible for 60 seconds to measure connectivity speed.In other words a speed test.In the past say month or two, I've found Macintosh systems 10.5 and higher experience a significant slow down, In testing I see my socket connect and reach about 2.5Mbps - 3.5Mbps and literally stick as though the .swf was throttling the connection.
This 'problem' is random and appears to come and go. I've tested this in Chrome,Firefox and Safari with all the same results.Using the exact same test on any Windows or Linux OS works totally fine.Admittedly I'm an ActionScript novice however the code I'm using is below and has worked for some time up until recently.
ActionScript Code: var s:Socket; var Tbytes:Number = 0; function connectToSocket():void{
I've run into some problems trying to handle large text files in AIR (300+ MB in size). I can open a filestream and read the file just fine and even store it into a string variable. the problem occurs when i try to manipulate this data. Im trying to get each line as an element in an array so i can manipulate this data.Here's what i've tried:1. read the file into a string variable and perform a split looking for the newline character ). this freezes the program2. i've tried reading the file in one byte at a time and putting each line into an array AS it is being read from the filestream. This not only takes long but eventually freezes.
3. i've tried splitting the final string variable which contains the entire text file into chunks to process it separately.4. i've even tried putting the file contents into a sqlite database, but this also freezes.At this point, im not sure what my options are. Is AIR even equipped to manipulate data at this level? I could use a point in the right direction
I had to manipulate a large number of XML and GIF files. In this case I will need to use a compressed file, like zip. if the flash can access this type of data like the Java do.
I'm currently working on a project where I generate a large amount of audio data to be stored on a users machine.
It works fine for small amounts of data but as the memory usage grows the flash application begins to struggle and eventually dies.
I've been thinking about possible ways to overcome this problem and I was thinking instead of storing all the data in memory (sometimes up to 100mb) a possible solution may be to stream the data to a server (44100 float numbers per second) as it is is being generated then once the accumulation of data has ended sending it back to the client.
1) can you see any problem with this idea and if so could you offer a better alternative? 2) could you reccommend a good server technology to achieve this?
Edit 1
To add more detail.
I am generating audio on the client using the sound.extract method. As the audio is being sent to the speaker I also send it to a byte array.
Once the user has hit a stop button I prepend a wav header to the audio data in the bytearray and allow the user to download a wav of the audio they have just being listening to.
Ideally I didnt want to impose a limit of how much data the user could save. This may not be possible.Storing all this audio data in memory was causing severe performance problems in flash. I don't know of any way to incrementally store this data on the client machines so I was thinking a solution may be to incrementally stream the data to a server somewhere to reduce the memory load.
I have a large flash project and I'm trying to figure out the best way to handle it. I want to load in an XML file of groups and their members, and a bunch of attributes related to each group and its respective members - but these groups and members are only displayed on screen after a user clicks on their parent groups. My first thought was to just pull in the XML for the whole tree of groups and users, then assign movie clips for the groups, and attach properties related to their display and how the user will interact with them - but if they may never appear on screen, is it pointless to do this? How do I best structure this project? Build an object and attach properties only to the object, then add display data only on click?
What is the best way to work large amounts of external data in Flash? XML, remoting,something else??I'm looking into a project that has a lot and I'm not sure what the best way to handle it would be
Requirement: Create single very large bitmap data which contain some 30 PNG images loaded and for each image it should have some text. Images and text are loaded dynamically (AS2 code. Images are stored in a remote server). The bitmap data display should show 8 images at a time and corresponding text. We can see rest content by scrolling (kinetic scroll is implemented). How can I go for it?Some questions:Is there any limit for size of bitmap data ( As per link there is restriction on the height of the bitmap we can create in AS2 (max value is 2880 which is not enough for some 30 element list If we create individual bitmap data for 30 individual PNG files, we find some jerks in scroll. How can we have smooth scrolling?
I have a web application that functions as a dashboard, allowing a user to see summaries of historical data to view trends, etc. As an extension to this, I want to allow the user to drill-down into the historical data if they so wish.What this will amount to is a table of time-value pairs, showing the time a particular data point was recorded as well as its associated value. The issue is that there could be a very large amount of data on record (millions of points is entirely possible), which means it wouldn't work to load all the data up front and display it to the user.
So far, my best idea is to implement the table of time-value pairs with "infinite scrolling" - i.e. the first x points are loaded and then as the user scrolls down the next x points are fetched and so on until the user reaches the end of the data (with a fixed-size cache of points, so that I don't run out of memory). The issue with this approach, though, is that there's no way to get to the end of the data without first fetching every point in between.
Another option would be to have a navigation interface with forward and back buttons, as well as some sort of date chooser so the user can quickly navigate to any data point they wish. This solves the problem of the first idea, but this navigation interface is far more clunky and less intuitive.My question is: is there some happy medium? A UI where it's clean and easy to navigate through the data but at the same time provide some method of jumping to a specific point in time?
Edits based on comments below:The development environment is flex and the database is SQL Anywhere, though the back-end logistics are less important to me than a clean, functional UI.
I have a large ArrayCollection that need to be displayed in series of Datagrid.After testing, the loading time is around 30secs-1minute.My question here, is there a way to gradually add each datagrid and display it instead of waiting until all datagrids to fully created?Existing :
Will I take a big hit in performance using nested ViewStacks? Should I strive to handle all navigation in one ViewStack and push children manually or will the affected performance be negligible?
We have a medium size Flex 3.6 application that contains around 20 different page views (managed via a single lazy ViewStack) each having multiple components. Most use custom renderers.All model data is loaded at startup and changes to model instances are communicated via binding and/or collection change events.Once the user has viewed each page at least once, all page views are instantiated and happily listen to update events.Which in effect means that each time a model instance changes, all interested views receive that event and compute derived data or trigger item-renderers.I have tested and confirmed this behaviour in a proof-of-concept application. Even when setting a list to being invisible, it still listens to collection change events and invalidates any renderer affected.What would you do?
how much memory (and swf size) the various built-in data types take up in actionscript 3? I'm specifically interested in int, Number, and (dense) Arrays or Vectors. I'm working on a project where I need to embed large amounts of structured array data, which is already in C++ format, so porting is just a matter of copy-paste, search-replace. I've already had a look at Adobe's lowdown on datatypes but it's not specific enough, and doesn't mention Arrays, etc.
