Random() Performance Tips

* Perceived performance is more important than actual performance, and is cheaper to implement. Learn about how to fake speed in progress bars, and never, ever, ever, ever let Flash lock up while doing processing -- break work across frames and do it asynchronously -- keep the UI responsive even if it's modally locked.

* Initializing variables to null is unnecessary, costly, and distracting (when you're trying to read code -- null or zero unless otherwise specified).

* Eliminate "this." wherever possible -- this may be outdated, but in the past it produced better bytecode.

* Don't use coding conveniences like lots and lots of extra variables, WITH blocks, extra "this" statements. They all add space and time in AS3 even though most other languages would compile down equivalent statements to the same thing.

* Long package and class names get stored in the SWF -- interned strings in the constant pool are a large percentage of SWF size.

* Keep lazy initialization of datastructures to a minimum (e.g. if (!foo) foo = new Foo() versus private var foo:Foo = new Foo()) -- class init and static init code is smaller and only runs once. The only advantages to lazy init are for data structures that are expensive to keep around if not being used, and/or you will null them periodically.

* Function arguments and local variables are cheapest to use because AS3 doesn't have to search up the scope chain when you access them. Global statics are awesome -- though caching their values locally is best if you're going to reference them a lot. Deep lookups like foo.bar.baz.getterFunction() are expensive if you're going to do a lot of work in baz -- try caching foo.bar.baz first.

* Anonymous functions: Don't get me started ;) See this post.

* If you use Flex, grep -r validateNow -- and eliminate them unless absolutely necessary. And if you don't remove it, leave a paragraph on why it must be there.

* Getter functions cost more than versus get() functions; and they often have hidden side effects. Don't write a getter unless that's all it does, and in constant time.

* Mark ever variable as const unless you need it to be variable. One day there may be a performance benefit, like finals in Java. But until then, bask in one fewer category of bugs.

* If you're embedding gobs of XML (damned if I know why you'd need to do this): Pasting the XML into a class as a static XML object offers the best performance and compression. The compile-time processing and optimization is significant versus runtime parsing, type checking, and decompression in a ByteArray (if you compressed it on the wire)