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Flash gets a lot of negative press because it’s seen as using a heap of CPU time and bogging everything down. And it’s a fair cop. Most flash will eat up your CPU cycles even when it’s sitting there doing nothing. But this isn’t a fault of flash, but rather of flash developers. Let me explain…

When you start a piece of flash work, you assign it a frame rate at which you want it to run, so it’ll update the screen, say, 30 times a second. This is all fine and good for when you’re animating things on the stage. But what about when you’re not? Well, it’s still running at 30 frames per second and chewing up your CPU like a crazy melon farmer. This is Not A Good Thing. So, anyhow, I’m watching this video about SWF Framerate Optimisation, and the guy’s showing how you can modify your code to lower the frame rate when there’s not a lot happening, and bring it back up when you’re animating. So I had a crack at it, and lo & behold, it works fine for the specific piece of flash I’d coded it into, so I wondered if I couldn’t just go and make a RateController class. This way, I could add a RateController object to any project to dynamically change the project’s frame rate depending on whether the mouse was over the stage or not.

And after much swearing about not having global access to the stage properties, I found that I COULD!!!

Here’s a working example placed into the attracting particles code I wrote yesterday:

Note: The animation starts at full speed for two seconds on startup. It’ll drop to the sleeping rate (5 fps) two seconds after the mouse leaves the stage, and then ramps back up to its waking rate (30 fps) instantly when the cursor is back over the stage. The FPSCounter shows intermediate numbers because it’s based on an average.

To add a RateController to any flash project, you can just use something like:

import RateController;
 
// Add a new RateController, uses the root stage, runs at 5fps when sleeping, 30fps 
// when active (i.e. when mouse is over the stage), and uses a 2000 millisecond
// delay after the mouse leaves the stage before dropping the FPS to the sleeping rate.
addChild(new RateController(stage, 5, 30, 2000));

Not bad, eh?

Full class code & file downloads after the jump…

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Think 25% CPU usage is unacceptable for a software firewall? You’d be right.

Steps to fix:
- Ctrl + Shift + Right Click on Zone Alarm icon in the system tray and select Set debug level from the pop-up menu
- Set Debug Level to Off by clicking the appropriate radio button in the Set debug level window
- Click [OK]
- Restart Zone Alarm (i.e. quit then restart it)

Works on:
ZoneAlarm version:9.1.007.002
TrueVector version:9.1.007.002

Feel free to delete the stupendous amount of logging dirge left behind by Zone Alarm’s “writing phase” in C:\Windows\Internet Logs while you’re at it.