Agile Enterprise Application Development with Flex

A Grab Bag of Useful Habits

This section discusses three areas that may seriously affect performance of your application: memory leaks, Flash Builder’s Profiler, and the just-in-time compiler. At the end of this section, you’ll find a checklist of items that can help you in planning performance-tuning tasks.

Dealing with Memory Leaks

Wikipedia defines a memory leak as “a particular type of unintentional memory consumption by a computer program where the program fails to release memory when no longer needed. This condition is normally the result of a bug in a program that prevents it from freeing up memory that it no longer needs” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memory_leak).

Flash Player offers help in dealing with memory leaks. A special process called Garbage Collector (GC) periodically runs and removes objects from memory that the Flex application no longer uses. It counts all references to each object in memory, and when it gets down to zero, the object is removed from memory.

In some cases, two objects have references to each other, but neither of them is referred to anywhere else. In this case, the reference count never becomes zero, but Flash Player tries to identify such situations by running a slower method called mark and sweep.

Sure enough, you need to write code that nullifies reference variables that point to objects that are not needed (myGreatObj=null;): if you call addChild(), be sure not to forget about removeChild(); if you call addEventListener(), keep in mind removeEventListener() ...