Blog Hacked!
Sorry for those of you that visited the site and got some nasty errors or spam. Apparently it was a fairly large scale attack on WordPress blogs in general and mine just happened to get hit. I’ve removed all of the malicious code. But from what I’ve learned it wasn’t really anything I could have prevented.
Flashbug 1.7 feature requests
I’ve been hard at work building Flashbug 1.7. It’s targeting Firefox 3.6+ and the latest Firebug so I get to remove a lot of legacy code and add some neat features. While a lot of the code is different and completely re-organized it’ll look almost the same except for a few new features. I’ve added a SWF info tab that will tell you the metadata (version, size, color, etc) of any swf. You can also export AMF data from remoting. Are there any other features that you would like to see in a Flash developer extension? Hit me up in the comments or add an official request to the issue tracker http://code.google.com/p/flashbug/issues/list
Flash / HTML Comparison
This comparison is very similar to the Flash/Canvas comparison with a minor change. The first Flash demo utilizes BitmapData to render the particles. Much like Canvas renders directly to a bitmap array. But I wanted to compare the speed versus HTML (animating with elements) and a Bitmap demo isn’t a fair comparison. So I have a second Flash demo that animated with Sprites. As with the previous demos, the particles are 1x1px white boxes to keep the look the same.
Another small change in these demos is that they increment by 10s instead of 100s. This is because it’s much more intensive to animate a sprite over a single pixel that really only exists when it’s finally drawn on the bitmap.
Also in an effort to let you see what the you can do with each, I’ve added controls to manipulate the minimum FPS. This will affect when the demos actually begin to throttle back.
| Browser | Particles | Particles Added Per Render |
|---|---|---|
| HTML – Firefox 3.6.4 | 400 | 20 |
| HTML – Chrome 6.0.437.1 | 800 | 30 |
| HTML – Opera 10.60 Beta | 800 | 30 |
| Flash 10.0.45.2 | 6,000 | 220 |
| Flash 10.0.45.2 Debugger | 5,000 | 180 |
| Flash 10.1.53.64 | 7,500 | 270 |
| Flash 10.1.53.64 Debugger | 6,500 | 230 |
* All results tested with a minimum FPS of 29
Flash / Canvas Comparison
With the canvas being a bit more prevalent and wanting to learn more about this HTML5 thing I decided to port Orion (one of my favorite projects) into JavaScript. I was curious to see the perfomance difference between the Flash Player and the (currently) fastest browser Google Chrome.
Now, I’m no JS expert so please let me know if there are any optimizations I could make but the logic is pretty sound in Flash. Keep in mind I don’t care how fast the page loads up, just how fast it performs afterward.
I also have it separated into two pages to keep the browsers from crashing or taking up too much memory. Also, to prevent crashing both demos auto throttle. As long as they can stay above 29fps they’ll add more particles. If not, it’ll throttle down and remove particles. This is checked every 3 seconds.
Below is the current test results I’ve experienced on my computer here at work. Just from what I’ve been able to experience, the Flash Player performs about 600% faster than Google Chrome. Which makes me wonder when HTML will be able to replace Flash in the interactive realm.
Also something to note, is the memory usage (which you can see in Chrome) is about the same in Canvas or Flash. Which leads me to believe that if people are complaining about performance in Flash now. Wait till people try to do the same thing in JavaScript. Same memory usage, same CPU usage, just slower.
| Browser | Particles | Particles Added Per Render |
|---|---|---|
| Canvas – Firefox 3.6.4 | 14,000 | 600 |
| Canvas – Chrome 6.0.427.0 | 50,000 | 2,100 |
| Canvas – Opera 10.60 Beta | 50,000 | 2,100 |
| Flash 10.0.45.2 | 260,000 | 11,000 |
| Flash 10.0.45.2 Debugger | 150,000 | 6,400 |
| Flash 10.1.53.64 | 270,000 | 11,500 |
| Flash 10.1.53.64 Debugger | 225,000 | 9,500 |
* All results tested with a minimum FPS of 29
Flash (Bitmap) Particle Speed Test
Update June 17
Here are the specs for my work computer as a reference:
MS Windows XP Professional 32-bit SP3
Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 @ 2.33GHz
2.0GB Dual-Channel DDR2 @ 332MHz
256MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 Pro (Dell)
78GB Western Digital WDC WD800ADFS-75SLR2 (IDE)
As you can see, nothing terribly impressive.
Another round of small updates
Apparently the last set of updates I did to .minerva, .merlin, .sparta and .whistler broke the auto-update functionality. Please manually update to the latest versions and I apologize for any hassle this may have caused.