I have used this technique to break up long running processes.
But I use two functions and two instance variables so that the function of the iterator is entirely separate from the processor. The way you are doing it , essentially recursively, may be causing the problem. Tracy ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charlie Hubbard Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 8:35 AM To: [email protected] Subject: [flexcoders] Performance and UI failing to update? I'm writing an AIR application where I have a very long operation that I need to run in the background. I know Actionscript doesn't have threads so I'm trying to simulate that using cooperative multi-tasking by breaking up my job into smaller pieces. I'm basically trying to parse an XML file, iterating over the nodes in that XML document, parsing the file that node refers to, add an entry to the SQL lite DB. The parsing of the XML is done separately from the iteration, and each iteration of the loop over the nodes is done using UIComponent.callLater(). So my algorithm looks pretty close to something of this form: function doIteration( currentIndex : int, totalIndex: int ) : void { var current : Object = objects[ currentIndex ]; doSomething( current ); callLater( doIteration, [ currentIndex + 1, totalIndex ] ); } My expectation is that by using callLater that will allow my UI to paint and update between each iteration of my loop. However, that doesn't seem to be the case. When my application starts this process it updates very infrequently, and freezes most of the time. I can put trace statements in my loop and see that it's processing loads of files very quickly, but the UI never gets updated. How does Flash behave when it's under a load like this? It runs as 12 frames/s, and I know that callLater is done at the end of each frame. What happens if that process run is longer than 80ms/frame (1000ms/s divided by 12 frames / s)? Does it ever catch up? Thanks Charlie
