Part of the reason I upgraded to the mac pro is my old Windows box is around 3yrs old, so the AMD 2Ghz Athlon was feeling slow and I'm waiting for things to start going up in smoke (again). The other motivating factor was that the tools/apps I work with most are now available for the Intel macs as universal binary.
I went with the quad processor 2.66Ghz model and was curious how it would compare with my old Windows box as far as compile times. I asked around a few times to try to get a feel for what to expect before buying, but couldn't get an answer. My Flash developer friends who have macbook pros didn't have a windows system for a comparison, or gave a "it's fast" answer. I wanted some hard numbers.. and couldn't get any.
So last night I did a compile of a complex SWF.. one that has.. oh.. hundreds of classes with an average of about 600 lines of code each, compiles to about 450k. It's a good workout for the Flash IDE when nothing is pre-compiled. hehe.. .
| Windows box | Mac Pro | |
|---|---|---|
Launching the IDE and viewing the FLA (double-clicking the file to start the IDE) |
25sec |
12sec |
First preview of movie (Test Movie) |
67sec |
50sec |
Second preview of movie (Test Movie) |
46sec |
33sec |
Now.. this IS comparing apples to oranges.. I'm comparing my "old" setup with my "new" setup.
- On the Windows box I'm using the Flash 8 IDE, Windows XP, an old 32bit AMD 2Ghz processor, 1.5Gb of RAM.
- On the Mac.. the all new Flash CS3 IDE, quad 2.66Ghz 64bit processors with 1Gb of RAM (I'll fix that soon enough..).
I'm betting there are some tweaks I can do on the mac to give the Flash IDE a little more speed, but I'm already impressed with how snappy it feels. Things like opening the Help panel, searching for "html", and then clicking the Help panel index button are much, much faster. It's those little things that add up over the course of a week. I'm sure there are other Flash related tasks that this new system will do loads faster than my old one too.
(edited to add.. ) I monitored CPU and RAM usage on my mac pro and found the bottleneck was RAM. I dropped another 2GB of RAM in and the publish time went down to 12seconds. Now there's about a gig free when I'm compiling this monster FLA so the bottleneck is now the processor(s) or how the Flash IDE is using them... The Flash IDE spreads the work out amongst the 4 processors most of the time, but it maxes out one processor for several seconds while the others are mostly idle. Anyway, it's a big improvement.
23 Aug 2007 at 07:06 am | #
I found out that Flash CS3 IDE is running extremely slow comparing with the older versions while you have a bunch of lines of codes...
My solution is using #include filename.as and editing the filename.as on Sepy, my favourite AS Editor
17 Sep 2007 at 05:54 am | #
Hey,
nice comparison, but I would almost more likely to have seen the improvements between Flsah 8 and CS3 on you macbook.
Because I hope the Flash CS3 compiler is much faster in library as well as classes, because flash 8 takes a lots of time!
17 Sep 2007 at 10:04 am | #
@Martin - yep.. agreed.. unfortunately I don't have the Flash8 IDE installer for mac, and I was personally more interested in the "what will I gain from switching to (a high end) mac?" And I got the answer. Once I added that RAM in it will compile in a fraction of the time it took on my old pc.