I put this together and presented it at the FlashKit 2003 conference in San Jose and will be presenting this and more at the Spring 2004 FlashForward conference.

One of the frustrating things about programming in ActionScript is that the delivery system (the Flash Player) has changed fairly drastically, and the information on the web and in other sources hasn't kept pace with it. Finding resources with current information about ActionScript Performance is difficult, as many of the best web sites give information based on getting the best performance from scripts running in Flash Player 5.

So I attempted to gather as many "best practices" from the web, books, and suggestions from others and test them to see how effective they really are. Some of the suggestions show huge performance gains, some show no performance gains, and a few actually show a negative impact on performance.

My hope was by gathering as much of the information together in one place and testing on several different systems that it would give a better view of how these best practices can be utilized in optimizing your ActionScript for performance. The results of the tests are by no means the final word on this topic, since the best test is in your actual scripts. Hopefully you'll find these tests useful and will help the Flash community by adding to them or improving them.

August 2003 Mike Lyda