A quick google indicates that, as Manish says, current thinking is to use timer for this type of work.
In addition to the libraries, Manish mentions, look at Alex's article/class: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui/2008/01/threads_in_actionscript_3.html Also there is an explanation in the flex cookbook: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=showdetails &productId=2&postId=12026 Tracy ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Charlie Hubbard Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 11:07 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: [flexcoders] Performance and UI failing to update? Tracy, Before I started parsing the file it actually worked simply iterating over the files and adding them to the DB without processing them. After I started parsing the files I started getting this halting of the UI. Do you have any more details about how your technique was different? Maybe a quick excerpt of code could help clarify your technique. Thanks, Charlie On Tue, Dec 23, 2008 at 10:26 AM, Tracy Spratt <[email protected] <mailto:tspratt%40lariatinc.com> > wrote: > 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:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> [mailto:[email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> ] On > Behalf Of Charlie Hubbard > Sent: Tuesday, December 23, 2008 8:35 AM > To: [email protected] <mailto:flexcoders%40yahoogroups.com> > 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 > >
