How to stop Flex UI components from freezing and tips for optimizing overall UI performance?

Question

I'm working on a flash based web application for work that involves an esri map layer in the background, and a window panel pop-up that has a couple UI components (text fields, dropdown menus, ESRI timeslider,time input fields, etc.)

I don't have much experience in UI's, especially FLEX UI's, and I was wondering if there are any general guidelines in improving the speed and performance of user interfaces.

My problem is that my application seems to work, until after a certain point when my drop down menus start to freeze and you can't choose any item from them anymore. The rest of the UI is fine, but certain components just stop responding. This includes mostly just the drop down menus and the my ESRI timeslider. Sometimes (I can't predict when it would happen), clicking pause on the timeslider after clicking play won't work. It essentially freezes, and the data that is supposed to be updated on the ESRI map as the timeslider moves does not show up.

If this information is relevant, the duration of time that the timeslider covers varies based on user input.

Are there any strategies to investigate why this is happening and what are some reasons for this? How do I make sure my UI is consistently working?

Answer 1

Profile your app using Adobe Scout. It's a free profiler for Flash that you can install from Adobe Creative Cloud. Basically the UI freezes if the system can't maintain a decent frame rate. You can read more about it in the Getting started with Adobe Scout article from Adobe. Here's a quote:

The most important thing to notice is the red line. This represents the budget time that you have to keep below on each frame, if you’re to meet the framerate you want to achieve. For example, on a SWF running at 30 frames per second (fps), you have a budget of 33ms per frame (1000ms / 30 frames). In other words, if you spend more than 33ms per frame, your application will start stuttering and skipping frames, which you really don’t want to happen!