O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Using Flex Builder 3's built in profiler is great but sometimes you need to do your profiling on a live site. What if you are still developing and need to debug at the same time as you profile? For a long time having a FPS counter (something not available in the Flex Builder's profiler) has always been part of my personal Flash development toolkit. Recently I was looking for something that would display FPS and Memory to help me closely monitor the performance of my application as I developed. That is when I came across Hi-ReS! Stats by Mr Doob.

The following has been excerpted from Adobe Flex 3: Training from the Source by Jeff Tapper, Michael Labriola and Matthew Boles with James Talbot. Copyright © 2008. Used with permission of Pearson Education, Inc. and Adobe Press. In this lesson, you will learn about both memory and performance profiling, two techniques facilitated by the new Profiler feature in Flex Builder 3 Pro. (Note: The new profiling feature is only available to users of Flex Builder 3 Pro. An evaluation version of Flex Builder 3 Pro is availabl from www.adobe.com/go/flex/. Flex Builder Standard users will not be able to access the profilerscreens.) To understand the need for this tool, you need to learn some details about how Flash Player executes code in Flex and how it allocates (gives) and frees (takes back) memory.