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November 18, 2004
Guest Post on File Upload
Jimmy Gianninas of Optimal Payments has been kind enough to write a quick example of one way to get file upload into your Flex app. Rather than write a full-blown devnet article which will take weeks to get edited and posted, we're putting it up on my blog to get it out faster. You can get the examples here. There is a Word document describing some of the files, and then a number of files that you can use as templates to get yourself going. Note that none of it will run out of the box, you must edit files and set up your server as appropriate.
Thanks again to Jimmy for the community contribution. If you have questions you might be better off posting on flexcoders rather than in the comments since I'm not sure how often he'll check them.
Posted by mchotin at 06:09 PM | Comments (4)
November 17, 2004
Enabling gzip compression for data services
Brian Deitte on the Flex team wrote up a quick set of classes that can be used to compress your network traffic for all 3 data services (RemoteObject using AMF, HTTPService, and WebService). Dan Schaffer on the QA team then did a number of performance tests to see what kind of improvements we could get. I've been given permission to re-post his results here. This is strictly for experimentation, it is not officially supported in any way.
You can download the source (includes a README for setup which you should read since it has more info than Dan's report) here. Dan's report follows:
Brian wrote a 3 classes to gzip compress the output of flex data services. Configuration is just a matter of adding a filter in web.xml. The player will detect the the header will accept gzip encoding then uncompress the content type. A minimum size may be set in the configuration so only data greater than the minimum is compressed. The implementation is really nice because the code is really independent of the Flex source code so it can easily work with any versions of Flex.
Based on a small study I would only recommend compressing the data service streams when the bottleneck is the network bandwith or very large datasets are common. Also under load even on a high performance server the additional cpu cycles required to compress the data stream may slow down the response time. Also the data must be compressible (ie text). I think most data will contain much repitition and be highly compressed with the gzip algorithm.
- Setup is Easy
compile the 3 classes and copy into WEB-INF/classes of the flex app and add to web.xml:
<filter>
<filter-name>GZIPFilter</filter-name>
<filter-class>filter.GZIPFilter</filter-class>
<init-param>
<param-name>debug</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</init-param>
<init-param>
<param-name>minimumSize</param-name>
<param-value>0</param-value>
</init-param>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>GZIPFilter</filter-name>
<servlet-name>AMFGatewayServlet</servlet-name>
</filter-mapping>
<filter-mapping>
<filter-name>GZIPFilter</filter-name>
<servlet-name>FlexProxyServlet</servlet-name>
</filter-mapping>
- Performance
Encoding a data stream is very cpu intensive. Only when using a fairly beefy server and sending more than 100k of data at once produced performance improvements. A slow server and small packet sizes produced slower round trip time than using an uncompressed stream. In cases smaller than 100k especially <50k the performance is worse with gzip compressing enabled.
I wrote a small app to send data via RemoteObject, HTTPService, and WebService data calls from the server to the flash player. The app sends the small xml files for each cases in 10k, 25k, 50k, 100k, 250k, and 500k. I ran a single client 12 times for each data service and size then removed the highest and lowest, averaging the remaining. On my laptop the gzip compression was always slower. Once I moved the webapp to flexload (a decent multi-processor server) only after 100k was the performance better with gzip compression enabled.
FLEXLOAD4 (time in MS)
10k 25k 50k 100k 250k 500k
Remote Object-gzip 138 150 150 167 324 1442
Remote Object 89 124 136 221 613 1407
Web Service-gzip 177 143 166 194 523 1600
Web Service 108 124 177 299 732 1846
HTTP Service-gzip 155 161 182 178 269 454
HTTP Service 88 107 151 239 466 905
T30 LAPTOP
(time in MS)
10k 25k 50k 100k 250k 500k
Remote Object-gzip 137 160 173 207 642 3294
Remote Object 103 102 129 153 554 2298
Web Service-gzip 240 267 240 271 871 3766
Web Service 110 142 158 213 788 3604
HTTP Service-gzip 140 149 149 209 267 352
HTTP Service 100 105 129 161 244 392
The data was very compressed:
uncompressed compressed
10k 1k
25k 2k
50k 2k
100k 3k
250k 7k
500k 13k
Posted by mchotin at 04:11 PM | Comments (2)
November 08, 2004
Data Management Talk Now Available
Not sure if I'll get in trouble for making this publicly available :-) Here's a recorded version of my MAX talk titled: Optimizing Flex Performance with Large Data.
Posted by mchotin at 12:26 PM | Comments (2)
November 04, 2004
How was MAX?
Plenty of other folks are writing about what went on at MAX, but I just wanted to say that I had a great time meeting the folks behind the emails and hearing about some of the things that people are doing. Many of the presentations should be online in the next few days, available at minimum for MAX attendees, not sure if they'll be available to the general public.
For those of you who attended the Flex sessions I'd love to hear what you thought. Did we cover enough? Should there have been more detail, less detail, more advanced, less advanced? Some people told me that they thought the sessions could have been longer with the amount discussed, though the ones that I attended didn't end up having much in the way of questions and ended on time. So I'll be curious to see what people thought and what we can do to make the sessions even better next time around.
Thanks to all who came by. Now get back to work and start using 1.5 :-)
Posted by mchotin at 02:34 PM | Comments (3)
November 02, 2004
MAX examples posted
I've uploaded the 1.5 versions of my data management examples, the same ones that I'm showing in my MAX presentation. Grab 'em here and give 'em a whirl. Please check out the README first to make sure you get it installed correctly.
Posted by mchotin at 12:41 PM | Comments (0)
Flex 1.5, GO GO GO
It's out. Go get it. You can download a trial for free!!!
Posted by mchotin at 12:39 PM | Comments (0)