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

[Josh Mellicker]

On Feb 17, 2010, at 10:44 PM, Jim Ault wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On Feb 17, 2010, at 8:10 PM, Josh Mellicker 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!_______________________________________________
> 
> 
> Something does not seem to be correct in this instance.

I know, I've always had the impression fields were slower.

> 
> Which version of Rev?  Which platform?

The latest, Mac 10.6.2

> Is the flag "script debug mode" set to false?

no

> Are there any pending messages in the queue?

The callback handler calls itself:

if "monitorExternalProcess" is not in the pendingMessages then send "monitorExternalProcess" to me in 1 milliseconds


> Front scripts? back scripts?

no

> 
> I have done many performance-critical event loops using variables and custom properties in networking apps between computers and offices.  Whenever I encounter a slow down, I look at my error trapping loops or status detection code and find that I have added clock cycles by not programming properly.
> 
> If you have discovered something that affects the performance so that fields are noticeably faster, then we need to know what is happening.  I have never tested fields to be as fast or faster than custom properties, especially for larger blocks of text (such as whole web page HTML)
> 
> Please, when you have time, provide a little more feedback.

I will, we need to get this revision out the door, then I will try and do some more tests.


> 
> Jim Ault
> Las Vegas
> 
> 
> 
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