Have you ever tried to use usePhasedInstantiation? It is not so easy, as you will see…

What is usePhasedInstantiation?
This is a property at the LayoutManager which is used to decide if the methods for the 3 Lifecycle phases (validateProperties, validateSize and validateDisplayList) are deferred with 3 (half-)frames or if they are all executed synchronously in one Frame. So if it is set to true (default state) at an EnterFrame event validateProperties() is called, on the next Render event validateSize() and on the next EnterFrame event validateDisplayList().

As I discussed in a previous blog entry, I was wondering why Flex is using a deferred asynchronous execution model. I tried to find out what happens if you change this property.

First I tracked the executed frames and checked out how it behaves with different use cases of Flex applications:
With a simply Flex application with a few random components it was like expected: 1 Frame delay for the whole cycle (3 half frames).
Then i added much more components and also some really heavy weight components like DataGrid, DateChooser or ColorPicker.
Here it took 3 frames, so it seems that there is some code in some of these Flex components which causes additional invalidation cycles (for instance if you call a invalidateProperties method inside of a creationComplete handler you will trigger a new cycle).
At last I measured with our Spreadbetting application at CMC Markets. Here it was a bit more difficult because there was more complex stuff going on. I measured the executed frames and time it takes until the application was idle in the login state and waiting for user input. We will compare the results later.

I tried to investigate to change this property to see and measure the effects on performance.
But unfortunately it didn´t had any effect. After stepping into the SDK sources, i found the reason:
It is set to true in the Containers createComponentFromDescriptor method which is called for adding the MXML children inside a Container. So it doesn´t help much if you set it to false at any place in the Application, because it will be overwritten by the adding of the first child at any Container class (Canvas, HBox,…).
I am not sure if there is a clean solution how to change this default behavior, but for my test case it was enough to simply ignore the value passed into the setter method in the LayoutManager and set the value to false by default.
But to change the LayoutManager is not so easy. It is setup in the SystemManager and to override this implementation you need to change the SystemManager which can be only defined in an own Application class.

Here are the steps how to do this:

In your MXML Application you use a custom Application class:

[code lang="actionscript3"]
MyApplication defines the custom SystemManager as factoryClass in the "Frame" metadata tag:
[code lang="actionscript3"][Frame(factoryClass="com.test.bootstrap.MySystemManager")]
public class MyApplication extends Application
[/code]
MySystemManager overrides the docFrameHandler method and set MyLayoutManager as implementation class for the ILayoutManager:
[code lang="actionscript3"]public class MySystemManager extends SystemManager {
override mx_internal function docFrameHandler(event:Event = null):void {
  Singleton.registerClass("mx.managers::ILayoutManager",
    Class(getDefinitionByName("com.test.bootstrap::MyLayoutManager")));
  super.mx_internal::docFrameHandler(event);
}
[/code]
In  MyLayoutManager you can bypass the assignment of the usePhasedInstantiation property:
[code lang="actionscript3"]public function set usePhasedInstantiation(value:Boolean):void {
  // for simple testing purpose:
  // simply ignore the values coming from Container and
  // set it by default to false
  value = false;

  if (_usePhasedInstantiation != value) {
    _usePhasedInstantiation=value;
    var sm:ISystemManager=SystemManagerGlobals.topLevelSystemManagers[0];
    var stage:Stage=SystemManagerGlobals.topLevelSystemManagers[0].stage;
    if (stage) {
      if (value) {
        originalFrameRate=stage.frameRate;
        stage.frameRate=1000;
      } else {
        stage.frameRate=originalFrameRate;
      }
    }
  }
}
[/code]
Another interesting detail is that Flex is setting the framerate to 1000 while these phased instantiation is active to speed up the execution (but this could also lead to strange side effects with too fast running animations like we have in our application with a pre-loader animation).
So lets do the tests again with this new setting:

The simple setup showed that all is executed inside of one frame and the time measured showed a faster startup, but the difference was pretty small.

The setup with the more complex Flex components gave a bigger difference in time and of course all was executed in one frame again.

In our CMC application the startup was 400ms faster (2300ms vs. 2700ms).

So 15% faster startup with usePhasedInstantiation set to false in our application startup.
To be honest, I was expecting more. Maybe it is related to the fact that at our application startup (until the login screen) there are not many components created.

I also tried to compare the 2 versions after the user has logged in and under heavy load with a lot of modules and windows open. I could not see a distinct difference but that was probably because of the complexity in this setup caused by a lot of network events.

At least i could not see any problems with rendering. The application was not freezing in any state, so the reason why usePhasedInstantiation was introduced to make the startup more fluidly, does not show any effect in our application.
What is the conclusion?

It does not improve the startup performance much if this property is changed (15% in our application), but I could imagine, when using a lot of components created all at once at startup time, the difference could be stronger. Maybe there could also be problems with freezing the rendering when setting the flag to false.
Even the result is for our use-case not much improvement, it was interesting to see how it is implemented, and to show that Flex is working fine without the deferred lifecycle as well. Also the technique how to exchange the SystemManager and how the implementation for a LayoutManager is configured, was an interesting learning.
			

At styling and changing my blog theme, i really fall in love with Web Developers (Firefox addon) CSS tools.
Just rollover or select an element and see the css used. Edit it live and see immediately the changes.
How nice would it be to have something inside Flex Builder?
For re-styling or adopting Flex projects this would be a great helper-tool, specially if you edit custom components from other developers.

If you feel this would be a nice feature, vote for it on the Adobe Bugbase.

You probably have seen already the Flex Style Explorer. It gives a good overview of the different styles of the standard Flex components.

BTW: Did you know that parts of Flex Builder are open source (the derived stuff from Eclipse)? You can download it at Adobe.