如何为基于Flex AIR的应用程序提供多进程体系结构？

Question

I developing an AIR application in Flex that would be dealing with playing different SWFs. I am finding some issues as these SWFs that I am playing are heavy. I find that the animation is not smooth and is causing the graph of CPU usage to go high (my be because single thread architecture of Flex). I am therefore planning to have a multi process architecture for my application. Something like Google Chrome. I have one main application as one process and other SWFs would be playing in separate process but should be seen inside the main application window. How to make it possible in Flex? Thanks!!

Answer 1

Unfortunately the flash runtime is single threaded. However, you can simulate threads by a judicious use of events. You can gain a perceived performance increase by letting the flash player handle when to execute your code by breaking up large blocks of code into smaller bite-sized methods that get called by events.

I highly recommend reading up on the elastic racetrack: http://drawlogic.com/2008/04/22/a-peek-into-the-as3-and-avm2-virtual-machine-and-elastic-racetrack/

Answer 2

Another alternative would be to distribute your logic into multiple SWF files and have them communicate via LocalConnection. If I'm not mistaken, in Chrome each flash player instance is supposed to get its own process; you should be able to consume plenty of CPU that way.

Answer 3

You aren't going to have any luck trying this with AIR. Perhaps with the Flash Player, as you could use the HTML page as a surrounding container, but you have no options with AIR for this.

It has to be said, if you are suffering such performance issues, there are almost certainly things you can do better in improving the performance.

Rather than fixing the symptoms ( App runs slowly ), how about tackling the cause ( The code causing the app to run slowly )?

Answer 4

This is not possible because the flash player does not allow multiple threads. Hopefully they will change this in the future.