[...] Life with Flex: Compiler (Thursday – 6/26) [...]

Hi Jon,

Flex compiler is quite slow. One alternative is use HFCD (http://stopcoding.wordpress.com/2008/06/17/hellfire_compiler/)

It will load flex compiler on memory, into a daemon and will keep it loaded. So you will not reload it over and over again.

Still slow, faster, but slow.

On modular applications (don’t looks be your case) you can get all files compiled faster using flex-mojos, it starts flex-compiler only once to compile all modules.

On single applications, you can try to use HFCD + flex-mojos. I didn’t made performance tests so far, but works http://blog.flex-mojos.info/2008/06/20/using-hellfire-compiler-under-flex-mojos/

VELO

Jon,
Even though the incremental compilation is turned on by default I guess much of the time is spent in producing the resulting SWF. Have you tried to divide your project using modules or library projects?

By the way – great blog
Looking forward for the rest of the series.

Will HFCD make difference inside of Flex Builder? It sounds like it loads the SDK / Compiler into memory too: http://www.adobeforums.com/webx/.59b4c61c.

You could also look at the Flex Compiler Shell (fcsh). I’m betting most of your 25 seconds is spent starting up the JVM, and fcsh keeps it around between invokes.
You don’t say if this is Flex 2 or 3, but 3 is a lot quicker than 2 was – if you are on 2 and can upgrade.

Are you currently just using mxmlc? If so you should use fsch:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex_Compiler_Shell

This is what flex builder (and FDT and flash develop) use internally and it doesn’t have the overhead of starting a Java enviroment for each compile… I think it’s already included in the Flex 3 SDK… It can be tricky to access from ant because it requires leaving the process running but this may help:

http://fcshwrapper.blogspot.com/

Cheers

At present time I don’t believe HFCD will bring any great result (may be if you give he move memory you can get better results, since compiler doesn’t share memory with eclipse any more.)

HFCD will show great results when you can run it on dedicated machines. Like compilation farms. But so far HFCD doesn’t support that.

VELO

We are using Flex 3 – inside of the latest Flex Builder…

-keep=true instructs the compiler to write the auto-generated text to your file system. I would use -keep=false to avoid the unnecessary file i/o.

you only use -keep=true when you suspect that the Flex compiler doesn’t generate correct code for your MXML components.

Also, Flex Builder uses incremental compilation by default. There is no need to set -incremental=true.

I think by removing the entire “-incremental=true -keep=true’, you get an acceptable compile time.

-C

So, if incremental defaults to true and keep to false then the settings you recommend are the defaults, correct? These were pretty slow for me. I only start playing trying different setting because of the poor compile times with the default configuration.

[...] Life with Flex: Compiler [...]

[...] Life with Flex: Compiler [...]