When dealing with animation and tweening in ActionScript, EnterFrame event is the most important factor. However, it is also one of the frequent factors to cause performance issue for your application. Using it efficiently is critical for every application.
The myths
The EnterFrame events reportedly generate 1500 – 1800 event objects per minutes. Imagine, in every instance of your component (for e.g. a text marquee), you add an EnterFrame handler to its own, that number of objects generated per minute will multiply. Keep in mind that, creating an object is one of the slow actions in ActionScript. So avoid creating too many event objects will theoretically improve application performance.
When discussing AS3Signals, I have mentioned an approach (raised by Robert Penner and AlecMcE) which uses a two-frame MovieClip which has some script attached to its frames. The MovieClip loops continuously between 2 frames. When the play head reach a frame, the script attached to it will call the handling function, imitating EnterFrame’s events. Some claims that: “The idea behind the approach is that a frame-loop is an internal Flash player structure. It sits underneath the AS3 functionality, and so it doesn’t produce ENTER_FRAME events”.
The experiments
To clear the myths about EnterFrame event performance and the 2-frame-loop approach, I have constructed an experiment of moving 5000 objects simultaneously using 4 different approaches:
