My flex application has a very bad load time (approx 5 to 8 wasted seconds) but only for FF and IE, Chrome appears fine.
I’ve determined there is some kind of useless idle time before the application’s initalization event fires. This is not just my development box, it happens everywhere. It is consistent across Flash version, OS and browser versions too. I’ve tried multiple. Chrome consistenly works very fast, IE and FF have this strange lag.
However locally, whether via localhost or remote IP, it doesn’t have this issue. I’m sure you’ll think it is the download time, but my SWF is very small (400K) and I’ve purposely made external images that are very small. I also prefetch the images via JavaScript, and firebug reports the the cache is used later. The download size can’t really justify the wait time. Not to mention, why is it so much faster in chrome? Is chrome really that fast downloading images and SWF files?
Also, minimal JavaScript is called from Flex, and I’ve more or less ruled out that is the issue. So it isn’t Chrome’s super fast handling of JavaScript.
I don’t see any large load times with Firebug. I see JavaScript excute in the browser inline during a page load, but then the appliation init within the SWF doesn’t fire for about 5 to 8 seconds later.
I don’t see why flash on Chrome is so much faster, nor what could be taking so long for Flash to kick in.
EDIT: Tried the Flex Profiler, but memory usage spikes AFTER the bad load time. Otherwise, I don’t know enough or see enough to recognize a problem with it.
I figured it out, turns out (for whatever reason) these browser are very slow if you use CSS to make the SWF invisible. Which I was doing while the page/Flash loaded.
Thanks for the suggestions all.