FYI: writing to and reading from fields much faster than locals, globals or custom properties

[Jan Schenkel]

--- On Wed, 2/17/10, Josh Mellicker <josh at dvcreators.net> wrote:
> You all probably know this, but
> thought I would share our experience anyway:
> 
> We are working on a project with a 1 millisecond callback
> loop that communicates with an external process in a
> performance-critical application, and when prototyping,
> temporarily used some fields on a card to write and read
> values from during the loop.
> 
> Then, while buttoning things up, instead of fields, we
> switched to reading and writing a custom property.
> 
> Suddenly, everything went sluggish - you had to click on a
> button several times to trigger it, you could barely move
> stack windows, etc.
> 
> It took a while to figure out the culprit, but once we went
> line by line from our original prototype script, wee found
> that going back to reading and writing to a field made
> everything work smoothly again!
> 
> Then we tried local, then a global variable... not good...
> same result as custom properties.
> 
> So if you are writing an app where performance is critical,
> Rev reads and writes to fields super
> fast!

If the field you're using to set/get data, is _invisible_ then it makes sense that this would be faster than set/get data using a custom property: built-in properties don't have to traverse the message hierarchy for setProp/getProp handlers, and an invisible field doesn't have to redraw itself.
Why it would be faster than global/local variable access, is a puzzler - are you using arrays or storing the text in the same 'flat' way as field text?

Jan Schenkel
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