Jonnie Hallman from DestroyTwitter fame and recently employed by the Adobe XD team, wrote a great article about how he reduced CPU usage in his AIR application.

“AIR gets a bad rap for being a bloated runtime, using up a lot of precious memory and CPU. Although a lot of AIR applications seem to fall into this trap, it doesn’t have to be this way. There are a number of techniques you can use to develop a lightweight application that rivals native programs in terms of performance,” he says.

The article explains what framerate throttling is and how best to implement it in your application.

One of the biggest complaints we hear a lot about AIR applications is that they use too much memory and/or too much CPU. Sure… Adobe needs to (and will) make investments in improving the performance of AIR and Flash Player but you as a developer can already make some improvements to your app as well. I know this has been discussed before but repetition never hurt anyone. ;-) If you’re having issues with the app that you are building, you should definitely check out Arno’s blog post about this very topic.

With just 4 simple tips, you can dramatically improve the memory/CPU usage footprint of your application.

1. Use the lowest framerate possible
2. Dynamically change the framerate to fit your application needs
3. Only use Event.ENTER_FRAME handlers when necessary
4. Have as few Event.ENTER_FRAME handlers and Timers as possible

Check out Arno’s blog for more info on how to implement these tips. The AIR team also has a blog post about this topic.

If you have any other tips that you are currently using, please feel free to leave a comment. Also, if you have any questions regarding this topic, please feel free to get in touch.