Performance Tools
You're looking for tools to squeeze the last bit of performance out of Director and/or your computer? Let's see, what we can find to help you get lightning fast.
RAM Disk
A RAM Disk can be a great performance tool, if you're looking for the fastest possible access to files "on disk".
The trick is to use a segment of your system RAM just like a regular harddisk. So you will need quite a bit of RAM in your system, if you want to create a large RAM Disk. But since RAM isn't very expensive anymore, this shouldn't be a huge problem nowadays. If you have a 64bit OS, your system can handle a lot of RAM (much more than those 4GB max. on 32bit OS).
Advantages
- Very high data rates (e.g. access 2 or more high definition video files at a time)
- Super low access times to files (access many small files as fast as possible)
Disadvantages
- RAM Disks store data only as long as the system is running
- You have to copy the content to the RAM Disk after you started your system and before using it
- Make sure you save any changed or new files to a safe medium before you shutdown or reboot your computer.
What do you need?
- Windows
- Mac OSX
Create a 1GB RAM Disk:
hdid -nomount ram://1073741824 newfs_hfs /dev/disk1 mkdir /tmp/ramdisk1 mount -t hfs /dev/disk1 /tmp/ramdisk1
Remove and unmount the RAM Disk:
hdiutil detach /dev/disk1
64bit OS
Even though Director, its runtime and the Shockwave Player aren't available as native 64bit applications, you can get some advantages from using a 64bit OS. The keyword is "larger max. available RAM". What exactly does this mean?
32bit OS means 2^32 bytes (4GB) of total system memory addressable.
Practically this means your application will be able to use up to 2GB max. (under certain conditions up to 3GB) on a 32bit OS. As long as you use a 32bit OS and a 32bit app, you won't be able to overcome this limit!
If you use a 64bit OS and a 32bit app, the situation changes considerably, because in theory the max. addressable memory space is way beyond what we can imagine today (2^64 bytes = 16 Mio. Terabytes).
On Windows Vista 64bit or XP 64bit, your 32bit apps run under the WoW64 subsystem and each of these apps can use up to 4GB RAM (if you have more than 4GB installed).
For Windows Vista x64 it's important to notice differences between the versions:
- max. 8GB RAM ... Vista Home Basic x64
- max. 16GB RAM ... Vista Home Premium x64
- max. 128GB RAM ... Vista Business, Enterprise, Ultimate x64