I am working on a full screen kiosk application in Flex 4/Air 2 using Flash Builder 4.
We have a company training website which staff can access via the kiosk, and the main content is interactive flash training videos. Our target machines are by no means ‘beefy’, they are Atom n270s @ 1.6Ghz with 1Gb RAM.
As it stands the videos are all but unusable when used from within the Air application, the application becomes completely unresponsive (100% cpu usage, click events take approx 5-10 seconds to register).
So far I have tried:
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increasing the default frame rate from 24fps to 60. No improvement.
nativeWindow.stage.frameRate = 60;
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running the videos in a stripped down version of my app, just a full screen HTMLLoader component pointed at the training website. No better than before.
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disabled hyper threading. The Atom CPU is split into two virtual cores, and the AIR app was only able to use one thread so maxed out at 50% CPU usage. Since the kiosk will only run the AIR app I am happy to loose hyper threading to increase the performance of the Air app. Marginal Improvement.
The same website with the same videos is responsive if viewed in ie7 on the same machine, although Internet Explorer takes advantage of the CPU’s hyper threading.
The flash videos are built with Adobe Captivate and from what I understand use JavaScript to relay results back to the server.
Adobe Air 2 recently came out of Beta (June 15th I beleive, the day I posted this question…) and this release correctly utilizes BOTH virual cores when hyperthreading is enabled on the CPU.
CPU usage when playing the flash content in the HTMLLoader component dropped from 100% to around 60%, a massive improvement.