Hello I have a flex project that is consuming XML data from a web service; (the detail of which is that it's coming across in an XStream serialised form).
In flex, I can parse this, and convert it into native objects (with effectively an ActionScript implementation of XStream). Unfortunately, the performance is horrible. For around 1Mb of data, representing about 3500 objects to be created, takes around 5 seconds. If 1Mb was the largest document size, I could probably live with it... but of course it isn't. Now, I had hoped to use the flex profiler in order to try and determine which bit is actually slow, as quite a bit of effort has gone into caching things that are known to be slow (e.g. class definition lookups). Unfortunately, again, the flex profiler seems to not be very useful. Firstly it doesn't often report on some classes at all, it often reports obviously bogus values (e.g. methods with cumulative time, but no actual calls (!)). It looks as if internal VM time, perhaps doing things like XML.getAttribute aren't being included (my gut feel is that my code is running reasonably fast, it's just coming up against VM performance that just isn't terribly good)., or perhaps that it's not recording in anything like a useful level of granularity. And because there's no threading, I can't even mitigate it by putting it in a background updater thread. I could probably add some AMF3 support. There's a variety of reasons why I didn't want to do that, as it's yet another output format to have to add on the server, which has already quite a bit of extra code to deal with things like removing hibernate proxies. TBH, it's disappointing the performance is so poor and is likely to add to the calls to be switching to silverlight. Are there any better profilers? Are there any details on the performance characteristics of the XML support, that I might use to speed it up?
