flash cs5: speed up development: any tips?

Question

My trouble is that my project is taking more and more time to be compiled.

My preoccupation is how to speed up this compilation? I used now a SSD hard disk and a quad core CPU. Do you think that purchasing an I7 core will speed up the compilation?

My fear is that it does not because Flash CS5 will not take advantage of the multi core.

Is there a hardware configuration someone can advise me?

Answer 1

I have had some very large projects (1000+ classes, easily), but never got to a point where my aging dual core laptop and 7200rpm HD were too slow, or where it became painful to wait for compilation. You have to set up your projects a bit differently, but you can decrease waiting time significantly.

Here are some things you can do to improve compilation time:

1. Take all fonts out of the equation(!). Embedding fonts into your SWF slows down the compiler like a rock chained to your ankle. If at all possible, always embed fonts into a separate fonts.swf and load it manually at runtime, or use runtime sharing. But even including a pre-compiled fonts.swc is faster than embedding fonts directly from the library.

2. Flatten your shape graphics, wherever possible. Keeping a large number of layers is nice while you're working on those, but compilation will run a lot quicker, if you keep as few layers as possible. Also, convert to symbols and reuse partial graphics as often as you can.

3. Keep logic and animation separate. Load animations at runtime, and split long movies into smaller parts, instead of keeping one large FLA with hundreds or thousands of frames and layers. Of course, each of those files has to be compiled, too - but probably not as often as the one you are working on while developing.

4. Same goes for bitmaps and video: Loading at runtime is a good choice for larger pictures and all video, and it also keeps media files more easily accessible for graphics people, while you are working on the code.

5. If for some reason, you can't load at runtime - perhaps your program needs to be in a single file - at least use SWC includes for all assets, and do your programming work from a main application FLA. An empty library compiles way faster than a full one. This is of course also true for shared FLA libraries.

6. Use a different compiler. The Flash CS5 IDE is sloooow, and it is not much use for coding, anyway. Adobe has their own eclipse-based solution Flash Builder, but there are free plugins for eclipse IDE, at least for AS2. Or better yet: Use eclipse with FDT - in my opinion by far the best solution for Flash development.

Answer 2

i appreciate weltraumpirat's answers i have a suggestion and a few questions of my own.

changing the JVM's Xmx setting (max ram i think)

http://forums.adobe.com/message/2854938

seems to fix an error with compiling large projects, does this also improve compile time?

changed from 128m to 850m (900 and above caused it to say my installation was corrupt even though i have 6GB of ram.)

didn't notice a big difference in the time it takes to compile...

I compile large projects all day (many of my clients insist on single file projects. (i may start looking into swcs) it would be great if i could set it to use 3gigs of ram for compiling and speed things up a bit.

I for one do not like Flash Builder (aka Flex Builder) Flash IDE is the App for me :P

also i wonder, does Flash IDE uses multi-core processing?