I noticed something that I had never really thought about. there is
quite a price to pay for RIAs (over and above the Flash plugin and the
swf download time). To test my program I had several open windows in
multiple browsers all displaying versions of my RIA app. The overhead
was quite noticeable. Each browser window had a swf with my RIA
competing for resources on the client.
"Well, that's unrealistic!": you might say. But, is it really? As
RIAs gain popularity throughout the web won't there be a high
probability of running multiple RIAs, (from the same or different
sources) concurrently, on a given desktop? Whew, that was a mouth full!
Of course, hardware technology advances will tend to mitigate the issue.
All this recent Flex chatter has made me rethink RIAs in a broader
sense.
To illustrate: If you go to the flex product page:
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/?promoid=home_prod_flex_111703#
and click the link to the Flex code explorer.
Aside: I am an old cuss, but it bothers me (more than a little) that
RIA links don't look like regular (HTML) links and the enter key
doesn't submit a form and hints sometimes popup too fast...
Anyway, the Flash Code Explorer pops up in another window.
On my DSL link (and it's a good one), the popup takes about 7 seconds
to load and about 3 seconds to render -- par for the course, I guess,
But, this showcase app feels "heavy" or "sticky".
The tree menu is one of the slowest I have seen... with noticeable
pauses when you open the top folder and push down the others.
Then, with the "sample" tab selected, click through the various tour
items. With each change a little initializing box pops for a second or
2 and then the example is displayed. That seems awfully slow.
Given this uneasiness with what I experienced, I did some rough timings
to see if I could quantify the cost (at the client) of an RIA
Here are my findings:
Mozilla 1.6 Mac OS X 10.3.3 CPU % Threads
Real Mem Virt Mem
----------------------------------- -------- -------
--------- ----------
No windows open......................... 1% 11
46M 425M
Mozilla Home page HTML (1).............. 1% 12
53M 432M
Flex Product page (2)................... 12-17% 19
60M 443M
Flex Samples (Code) Explorer Popup (3).. 25-29% 20
73M 462M
Flex Explorer Popup (4) 11-15% 13
70M 449M
(1) Simple animation (gifs, etc)
(2)
http://www.macromedia.com/software/flex/?promoid=home_prod_flex_111703#
(3) takes 7 seconds to load and about 3 seconds to render)
(3) these measurements have the flex product page and the popup open
concurrently
(4) Popup window is the only window open
Not a scientific timing for sure... just a rough "eyeball" of some
slices in time -- with a normal (for me) mix of other stuff going on.
But, I think the exercise illustrates at least 3 points.
1) RIAs have a cost -- they continuously consume CPU cycles whether
they are being used or not.
2) Multiple RIAs on the same desktop are highly probable and they
compete for valuable client resources.
3) A RIA that performs poorly loses much of its advantage (or, its
reason for existence).
On Mar 30, 2004, at 7:32 PM, Dick Applebaum wrote:
> Yeah -- but this is a pretty bad example IMO
>
> Functionality --- great
>
> UI -- good
>
> Performance -- poor at best
>
> I addressed this in an earlier post that was lost in the flurry��of��
> Flex responses
>
> Below is��the relative snippet
>
> Certainly there must be some better examples with a realistic db��
> backend.
>
> Dick
>
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