BlazeDS slow with large number of objects

Question

I'm developing a mobile app using Flex and I have run into some problems using BlazeDS. Some users request a (relatively) pretty large amount of data from my server, which returns in about 2 seconds. The data consists of some pretty simple objects (Client, which has a name/phone/email, and a few other properties, some of which are other nested objects with more properties). The largest requests consist of no more than about 10,000 of these objects, which is only a few MB in size. The problem I am running into is that as soon as the server sends its response, the mobile screen locks up while the data is being processed. For 10,000 objects, this can take several minutes and sometimes even crash the device, and at best leave the user with a frozen screen the entire time. For the average user, it is at least 2-5 seconds of frozen screen. This is not only an issue for devices with limited capabilities. This also happens on my PC (i5 processor, 8GB RAM). From what I can tell, this downtime is taking place somewhere between when the device receives the response and when I can access the data. Setting a breakpoint on the first line of the following RemoteObject result handler has the screen lock up BEFORE it reaches the breakpoint:

protected function myResultHandler(event:ResultEvent):void
{
    var result:ArrayCollection = event.result as ArrayCollection;
    //Do other stuff here
}

I know very little about BlazeDS and AMF, so my only guess is that the freezing happens while the objects are being created on the device. Is there any way to speed up this process at all? Should I normally expect to see really poor performance like this? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

After a couple of hours digging around, I found the solution to my problem: On the server side, the objects I was sending had a ton of extraneous properties unrelated to the information I needed on the mobile app. In addition, there were helper methods on those classes in the form getMyHelper() which would attempt to generate a property on the Flex side. This resulted in a huge list of reference errors being thrown during the download since no properties with those names existed in the AS objects. I created stripped down 'lite' versions of the objects I needed sent across with no extra properties or methods. The massive lists now display nearly instantaneously after receiving the response from the server.