Yes, using the profiler look at all the references that appear in the mx_internal namespace. For the most part those are impossible to get to and remove and then you look at what they hold on to and you see that it holds onto stuff inside the Flex Framework, and from there it is holding on to stuff that is in your code, and what do you see in there? Stuff that comes back to an mx_internal namespace object, most likely a low-level event listener that has its handler strongly referenced to something. This will never get marked by the GC for collection and will persist until the VM is exited.
The thing is you are working with a more traditional usage scenario for Flash, our problem is that we have consistent data that is loaded and kept in the application, and then more data is loaded on top of that (when they open more files). I can see us have less issues if we had seperated out files into seperate SWF's that are loaded and unloaded (and even more so now with that stupid new stop and unload function). But our main issue is that we sort of hacked it to work in an MDI style way and our problem comes from the fact that we do not get a lot of oppertunities to re-uses components which would help a lot.
I am not trying to totally dismiss Flash/Flex, I think it has a lot of potential and I actually really like AS3 (and wish ECMAScript4 had been settled on for use in browsers) in terms of syntax and how you do things, but I just think the VM needs a lot of work to get it up to snuff with other VM's out there like the JS ones in newer browsers and the Java VM.
Its not that we couldn't get it to work better, its that the features added were too big or not meant for Flash. Where as the version written in Flash 6 was a single document interface that was strictly limited in terms of how many objects you could create, this version has no limitations and is a multi-document interface.
I wish there was that much bureaucracy to blame for this situation...:(
The previous version of this application had been done in Flash (6 mind you) and worked well.
With this release though it got a bit too big for its britches, and more than likely this could have been seen from the start, but it wasn't and now we are paying for it. In the end its probably not as bad as it sounds and I have been moved off to work on other projects at the firm, but still it is annoying from a name and quality standpoint.
The point is you shouldn't have to, at least not to the extent that we have had to to get the performance that we need.
For example we have used bitmap caching, implemented by us because Flash's seems to be unstable and random at best, over vectored Flash components. This has led to issues in that we have to now manage all the refreshing of cached images for nodes on this graph any time the data changes among other things.
I am not alone in my complaints, there are quite a few comments in major Flex blogs about its shortcomings.
And I would like to remind that its mainly Flex that has these issues. This project could have been done in entirely in pure AS3 with out the Flex overhead, but it would have taken twice as long probably. We also have written a number of major components not using any part of the Flex framework and they are much much faster just using raw sprites and DisplayObjects.
My major gripe is that Adobe is trying to pass off AIR and Flex as a mature development platform and it is clearly not.
Have you stopped to think that maybe your code has something to do with it?
Yes, many times, and no I do not think my code is ever perfect, or even near perfect, but the proof is in the pudding, you can make very simple test cases and see very obvious drawbacks using just their code/UI components.
One of the problems with working with Flex is that sometimes you have to do things that seem incredibly retarded to get things done. Look at the extensive use of the callLater method in a lot of the Flex SDK code. This method basically says "ok things aren't done, so do it later." Not only does this seem to just patch a problem with not correctly sequencing your methods to fire when they are able to, but it creates huge memory leaks and is horribly hard to debug as you rarely can see past the point of the callLater in the stack.
This reminds me of another problem, in the fact that you can not catch run-time errors at the "root/base" level of the Flash/Flex/AIR application, and even better, if you do not have a debug version of Flash player (and forget it in AIR) then it just completely ignores the error and continues on as if nothing has happened. This then causes Flash to start chucking random errors and glitches that might get caught in your own try-catch blocks much, much later, and you will find that code that works perfectly under every imaginable situation is now glitching with really no known cause. Debugging can be quite the nightmare in Flash.
Really though they are not that big. One is a graphing and reporting application, and another is a web interface for a CMS that we developed in house as a product.
The first could have been done in Java, or a cross-platform C++ framework like Qt (though that would remove the selling point that it runs on the desktop and the browser), and the second could be done purely in JS, so there were alternatives, maybe more appropriate ones, but they were not taken.
I have been working on two large enterprise class applications using their Flex/AIR framework and the performance is absolutely dismal!
The Flash VM is slow beyond belief when getting into large data-structures, event its native array parsing is incredibly slow.
Object instantiation is slower than molasses. We were averaging about 7 seconds to instantiate about 500 fairly complex objects that in most any other language, compiled or interpreted would have easily been created in a thousandth of that time.
The Flash VM's garbage collection is perfectly incapable of doing anything that involves long application run-times and leaks memory all over the place, even inside its native low-level components. It got to the point that even doing any proactive cleanup in our code was totally fruitless and I am sorry to add that a lot of the proactive steps we were taking have been left by the wayside because it is utterly hopeless to release all the memory you have taken back to the system.
Loading an SWF inside another SWF and then disposing of it will not stop the loaded SWF's playback and it does not release it from memory. Instead of Adobe fixing this obvious bug they just added a different method in Flash 10 called "unload and stop" or something like that. This requires anyone who wants to fix this issue to go back and refactor their code!
There are also numerous inconsistencies between applications that run in Flash and those that run in AIR, even though the code base is the same and the idea is that you do not have to change any obvious code to make it work in one platform or another.
Even flashes most basic function, doing vector drawings and animations fails horribly under load. We have had to hack and jury-rig numerous fixes in to compensate for Flash's seemingly random graphical glitches.
If Adobe wants to be taken seriously as a application platform developer, especially one that is used on the desktop they need to get their shit together because right now it feels like a childs toy or half-assed attempt to enter a new market.
Unfortunately the project, the client, and the management have chosen this path for us and we are stuck with it so I really hope that Adobe gets it together because its been a royal pain doing this sort of work on their platform.
They do the same thing in Washington State in Pierce and King County as well (might in others too), the state also provides a website for carpooling that allows people to meet up and find routes for people to use their personal vehicles to carpool.
Having heard this one before first hand... It is creepy!
I swore it had to be some diagnostic noise because it sounded too perfect to be mechnical, but everything I came upon told me that it was just the head of a dead drive...
Needless to say I installed a RAID5 on that computer and use another fileserver for backup...
Our state can defend, and the border agents can at THE BORDER, not 75 miles from a border that is in the middle of the Straight of Juan de Fuca!
The only way to cross that is by a stable ocean rated going boat, and most of the people that cross do it by ferry where they go through customs on both sides of the US-Canadian border.
The Feds can fuck right out of the rest of Washington State. They seem to ignore us for everything else, if they want to roll around harrasing our citizens then they can do a lot more for us as well.
A friend of my mother was driving out to a nursery on the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington and was stopped at a border patrol checkpoint before the Hood Canal floating bridge.
Everything would have been fine except for the fact that she was driving a van with a couple of university exchange students (not sure of their nationality) and they did not have their student visas with them.
Border patrol freaked out and started harassing my mothers friend, saying that they would arrest her for carrying "illegals" and other such non-sense.
Eventually they let them go on their way, but the experience, to say the least, was fairly traumatic. No one expects to be randomly checked inside their own borders and to be harassed by federal agents.
There have been other instances where border patrol has set up check points in the middle of small towns here and forced checks on anyone passing them.
This is not only attack on our personal rights, but the rights of the state as well. Federal agents should not be allowed to set up check points beyond the immediate border.
A very secretive/private girl I know at a very big university in a certain western state just got a grant (or part of a grant) to do something like this a few months ago. She has for the past few years been interning at a couple large defense contractors and also certain government agencies involved in space.
She didn't go into much and I don't want to give away any more details than I should (losing her funding would suck, she has already spent two years on this as her thesis work).
Basically she said they are working on what the article said, but more specifically tracking specific people via satellite.
I do not know if that means actively passing a person from satellite to satellite as they move into and out of area or what but it sounded pretty spooky.
Agreed. I am forced to develope flash applications at my job and its a pain. There are memory leaks all over the place in the flash vm that you CAN NOT get to and fix with your own code.
Just today I got an AIR app up over 1.5 gigs, yes, GIGS of ram! And that was from opening and closing the same file 3 times.
The flash player VM is horribly broken in many ways.
We have been developing a couple huge applications based on Flash/Flex/AIR and we have run into a number of annoying issues.
For one the flash player will never fully release objects from memory. It's garbage collection cleans up about 25% of the references in memory, but there are very low-level event listeners in the VM itself that hold on to objects, and in-turn those objects have other listeners that hold on to other objects.
Our application starts out at about 80MB of memory usage (which in itself is bad enough) and within a few hours its well over 500MB.
Second annoyance is that run-time errors are never reported in the non-debug player. Flash will continue trying to execute the rest of the movie even if it has had a horrible error. To compound the issue AIR does not have a debug version of its runtime so when we receive errors from our clients we have very little go on because by the time the application manifests the error in some sort of visual fashion it might have been hundreds of commands back.
Flex/AIR will never take off unless they fix these issues. The framework is a joke and AIR leaks memory faster than the Titanic took on water.
If I get this right, I might be wrong, the Ad tracking relies on cookies from the same domain it was set at, so that means the same advertisers on those pages that they would be tracking you across.
Unless you are using a proxy they could glean the same relative information from your IP address...
Paranoia about cookies is really absurd, and if your actually that scared of them why use NoScript, just have your browser notify you when its setting a cookie and if you want to accept it (and continue accepting it) for that site.
Remember that the Wright Brothers didn't invent the airplane, and that Henry Ford didn't invent the car. Are they inferior to the original airplane/car inventors?
Actually I think the Wright Brothers did invent the first airplane (at least the first powered one)...
I don't think he was saying FF was worse because they copied... he just said give credit where credit is due.
<fanboi>Also Opera's "cool bar" is better than firefoxs </fanboi>
while the Opera devs just turn up their noses at any feature they didn't come up with? That's fucking stupid. I dont think anyone said that... if I had mod points I'd mod you as a troll but cest la vie...:(
Also just because it doesnt have your one pet feature is no need to throw a hissy fit about it.
If your monitor/screen is too small to have a forward and back button comfortably fit then maybe you should think about moving out of the world of 640x480 and get something a little bit bigger?
Fuck them. Fuck bitch-whining about "copying". Give us the fucking features and make the product better. Quit whining about your small... screen.
Flex will never be any sort of real platform till Adobe fixes the horrible memory issues associated with Flash Player 9's garbage collection.
Event listeners and timers used by the underlying Flash player are stored deep inside the VM where you have no access to free them, and those in turn will hold on to other objects and Flash will never return memory to the OS until you close and terminate the whole VM.
There is very little you can do about this, and anything you can do just slows down the giant memory leak. After a few hours of work in even the smallest of Flex/AIR apps the Flash VM can easily be using 500Mb+ of ram.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, using the profiler look at all the references that appear in the mx_internal namespace. For the most part those are impossible to get to and remove and then you look at what they hold on to and you see that it holds onto stuff inside the Flex Framework, and from there it is holding on to stuff that is in your code, and what do you see in there? Stuff that comes back to an mx_internal namespace object, most likely a low-level event listener that has its handler strongly referenced to something. This will never get marked by the GC for collection and will persist until the VM is exited.
The thing is you are working with a more traditional usage scenario for Flash, our problem is that we have consistent data that is loaded and kept in the application, and then more data is loaded on top of that (when they open more files). I can see us have less issues if we had seperated out files into seperate SWF's that are loaded and unloaded (and even more so now with that stupid new stop and unload function). But our main issue is that we sort of hacked it to work in an MDI style way and our problem comes from the fact that we do not get a lot of oppertunities to re-uses components which would help a lot.
I am not trying to totally dismiss Flash/Flex, I think it has a lot of potential and I actually really like AS3 (and wish ECMAScript4 had been settled on for use in browsers) in terms of syntax and how you do things, but I just think the VM needs a lot of work to get it up to snuff with other VM's out there like the JS ones in newer browsers and the Java VM.
Its not that we couldn't get it to work better, its that the features added were too big or not meant for Flash. Where as the version written in Flash 6 was a single document interface that was strictly limited in terms of how many objects you could create, this version has no limitations and is a multi-document interface.
I wish there was that much bureaucracy to blame for this situation... :(
The previous version of this application had been done in Flash (6 mind you) and worked well.
With this release though it got a bit too big for its britches, and more than likely this could have been seen from the start, but it wasn't and now we are paying for it. In the end its probably not as bad as it sounds and I have been moved off to work on other projects at the firm, but still it is annoying from a name and quality standpoint.
The point is you shouldn't have to, at least not to the extent that we have had to to get the performance that we need.
For example we have used bitmap caching, implemented by us because Flash's seems to be unstable and random at best, over vectored Flash components. This has led to issues in that we have to now manage all the refreshing of cached images for nodes on this graph any time the data changes among other things.
I am not alone in my complaints, there are quite a few comments in major Flex blogs about its shortcomings.
And I would like to remind that its mainly Flex that has these issues. This project could have been done in entirely in pure AS3 with out the Flex overhead, but it would have taken twice as long probably. We also have written a number of major components not using any part of the Flex framework and they are much much faster just using raw sprites and DisplayObjects.
My major gripe is that Adobe is trying to pass off AIR and Flex as a mature development platform and it is clearly not.
Yes, many times, and no I do not think my code is ever perfect, or even near perfect, but the proof is in the pudding, you can make very simple test cases and see very obvious drawbacks using just their code/UI components.
One of the problems with working with Flex is that sometimes you have to do things that seem incredibly retarded to get things done. Look at the extensive use of the callLater method in a lot of the Flex SDK code. This method basically says "ok things aren't done, so do it later." Not only does this seem to just patch a problem with not correctly sequencing your methods to fire when they are able to, but it creates huge memory leaks and is horribly hard to debug as you rarely can see past the point of the callLater in the stack.
This reminds me of another problem, in the fact that you can not catch run-time errors at the "root/base" level of the Flash/Flex/AIR application, and even better, if you do not have a debug version of Flash player (and forget it in AIR) then it just completely ignores the error and continues on as if nothing has happened. This then causes Flash to start chucking random errors and glitches that might get caught in your own try-catch blocks much, much later, and you will find that code that works perfectly under every imaginable situation is now glitching with really no known cause. Debugging can be quite the nightmare in Flash.
I completely agree... :( But we are stuck with it.
Really though they are not that big. One is a graphing and reporting application, and another is a web interface for a CMS that we developed in house as a product.
The first could have been done in Java, or a cross-platform C++ framework like Qt (though that would remove the selling point that it runs on the desktop and the browser), and the second could be done purely in JS, so there were alternatives, maybe more appropriate ones, but they were not taken.
I have been working on two large enterprise class applications using their Flex/AIR framework and the performance is absolutely dismal!
The Flash VM is slow beyond belief when getting into large data-structures, event its native array parsing is incredibly slow.
Object instantiation is slower than molasses. We were averaging about 7 seconds to instantiate about 500 fairly complex objects that in most any other language, compiled or interpreted would have easily been created in a thousandth of that time.
The Flash VM's garbage collection is perfectly incapable of doing anything that involves long application run-times and leaks memory all over the place, even inside its native low-level components. It got to the point that even doing any proactive cleanup in our code was totally fruitless and I am sorry to add that a lot of the proactive steps we were taking have been left by the wayside because it is utterly hopeless to release all the memory you have taken back to the system.
Loading an SWF inside another SWF and then disposing of it will not stop the loaded SWF's playback and it does not release it from memory. Instead of Adobe fixing this obvious bug they just added a different method in Flash 10 called "unload and stop" or something like that. This requires anyone who wants to fix this issue to go back and refactor their code!
There are also numerous inconsistencies between applications that run in Flash and those that run in AIR, even though the code base is the same and the idea is that you do not have to change any obvious code to make it work in one platform or another.
Even flashes most basic function, doing vector drawings and animations fails horribly under load. We have had to hack and jury-rig numerous fixes in to compensate for Flash's seemingly random graphical glitches.
If Adobe wants to be taken seriously as a application platform developer, especially one that is used on the desktop they need to get their shit together because right now it feels like a childs toy or half-assed attempt to enter a new market.
Unfortunately the project, the client, and the management have chosen this path for us and we are stuck with it so I really hope that Adobe gets it together because its been a royal pain doing this sort of work on their platform.
The programs are called Vanshare/Vanpool in King and Pierce County and Rideshare is the name of the state-wide program.
They do the same thing in Washington State in Pierce and King County as well (might in others too), the state also provides a website for carpooling that allows people to meet up and find routes for people to use their personal vehicles to carpool.
Having heard this one before first hand... It is creepy!
I swore it had to be some diagnostic noise because it sounded too perfect to be mechnical, but everything I came upon told me that it was just the head of a dead drive...
Needless to say I installed a RAID5 on that computer and use another fileserver for backup...
Our state can defend, and the border agents can at THE BORDER, not 75 miles from a border that is in the middle of the Straight of Juan de Fuca!
The only way to cross that is by a stable ocean rated going boat, and most of the people that cross do it by ferry where they go through customs on both sides of the US-Canadian border.
The Feds can fuck right out of the rest of Washington State. They seem to ignore us for everything else, if they want to roll around harrasing our citizens then they can do a lot more for us as well.
A friend of my mother was driving out to a nursery on the Olympic Peninsula in Western Washington and was stopped at a border patrol checkpoint before the Hood Canal floating bridge.
Everything would have been fine except for the fact that she was driving a van with a couple of university exchange students (not sure of their nationality) and they did not have their student visas with them.
Border patrol freaked out and started harassing my mothers friend, saying that they would arrest her for carrying "illegals" and other such non-sense.
Eventually they let them go on their way, but the experience, to say the least, was fairly traumatic. No one expects to be randomly checked inside their own borders and to be harassed by federal agents.
There have been other instances where border patrol has set up check points in the middle of small towns here and forced checks on anyone passing them.
This is not only attack on our personal rights, but the rights of the state as well. Federal agents should not be allowed to set up check points beyond the immediate border.
A very secretive/private girl I know at a very big university in a certain western state just got a grant (or part of a grant) to do something like this a few months ago. She has for the past few years been interning at a couple large defense contractors and also certain government agencies involved in space.
She didn't go into much and I don't want to give away any more details than I should (losing her funding would suck, she has already spent two years on this as her thesis work).
Basically she said they are working on what the article said, but more specifically tracking specific people via satellite.
I do not know if that means actively passing a person from satellite to satellite as they move into and out of area or what but it sounded pretty spooky.
Agreed. I am forced to develope flash applications at my job and its a pain. There are memory leaks all over the place in the flash vm that you CAN NOT get to and fix with your own code.
Just today I got an AIR app up over 1.5 gigs, yes, GIGS of ram! And that was from opening and closing the same file 3 times.
The flash player VM is horribly broken in many ways.
We have been developing a couple huge applications based on Flash/Flex/AIR and we have run into a number of annoying issues.
For one the flash player will never fully release objects from memory. It's garbage collection cleans up about 25% of the references in memory, but there are very low-level event listeners in the VM itself that hold on to objects, and in-turn those objects have other listeners that hold on to other objects.
Our application starts out at about 80MB of memory usage (which in itself is bad enough) and within a few hours its well over 500MB.
Adobe ignores this and in some cases becomes horribly defensive about it.
Second annoyance is that run-time errors are never reported in the non-debug player. Flash will continue trying to execute the rest of the movie even if it has had a horrible error. To compound the issue AIR does not have a debug version of its runtime so when we receive errors from our clients we have very little go on because by the time the application manifests the error in some sort of visual fashion it might have been hundreds of commands back.
Flex/AIR will never take off unless they fix these issues. The framework is a joke and AIR leaks memory faster than the Titanic took on water.
If I get this right, I might be wrong, the Ad tracking relies on cookies from the same domain it was set at, so that means the same advertisers on those pages that they would be tracking you across.
Unless you are using a proxy they could glean the same relative information from your IP address...
Paranoia about cookies is really absurd, and if your actually that scared of them why use NoScript, just have your browser notify you when its setting a cookie and if you want to accept it (and continue accepting it) for that site.
I assume Firefox has that ability.
Press F-12 the uncheck enable javascript... that has been around since at least version 5 (when I started using Opera).
Remember that the Wright Brothers didn't invent the airplane, and that Henry Ford didn't invent the car. Are they inferior to the original airplane/car inventors?
Actually I think the Wright Brothers did invent the first airplane (at least the first powered one)...I don't think he was saying FF was worse because they copied... he just said give credit where credit is due.
<fanboi>Also Opera's "cool bar" is better than firefoxs </fanboi>
Flex will never be any sort of real platform till Adobe fixes the horrible memory issues associated with Flash Player 9's garbage collection.
Event listeners and timers used by the underlying Flash player are stored deep inside the VM where you have no access to free them, and those in turn will hold on to other objects and Flash will never return memory to the OS until you close and terminate the whole VM.
There is very little you can do about this, and anything you can do just slows down the giant memory leak. After a few hours of work in even the smallest of Flex/AIR apps the Flash VM can easily be using 500Mb+ of ram.
Yes.