flash stops on beginning frame after days of playing

0
votes

We have swf files that play on our clients screens constantly for days to months without ever being restarted. most of them work fine, however after a seemingly random amount of time, usually between days and weeks, parts, or all of the flash movie will freeze.

The file loads in a text file using LoadVars every 15 to 30 seconds. After a while, it seems to stop loading the file and just set all text (prices) to zero. sometimes the flash animations might continue to play while the text is zero, but sometimes it seems to freeze completely on the very first frame of animation, so that parts of the screen may be white, just like the first frame in the flash editor looks.

Once we connect to one of these devices remotely using logmein, it starts to work again, which i believe may be because the screen is quickly refreshed which starts the animation again.

I've done some research, and i've come to find that playing full screen for a period of time while hardware acceleration is on can cause this to happen, however, turning off hardware acceleration is not an option as the animation looks like crap.

There seems to be no correlation between flash player version or hardware and this problem occurring.

So, is there any way to detect an exception in the flash animation from actionscript, or when it just freezes? I believe actionscript continues to run happily in the background while the video freezes, although this is yet untested.

does anybody have any ideas that might solve a problem like this? preferably a solution that involves only editing the flash files instead of configuring our clients machines, as we have thousands of devices out there, and configuring them in any way may disrupt our clients businesses.

1
flashactionscript
Are these swf files in the browser or loaded in to a projector exe? What version of Actionscript were they written in? - Neil
im guessing as2 "LoadVARS", i found my flash files to crash at random if my pc has been on for a couple of days with out its sleep..i found this to happen to simple apps or what have you - joshua

1 Answers

1
votes

From my experience, there are no issues in flash/as2 when running over a long time. I have been part of creating applications that have been able to run for > a month without any performance issues. However, it is really, really hard to find those pesky bugs that happens after an application have been active for a long time since they are hard to pin down and are usually part of some core functionality.

Most likely you have some of the following common issues:

  • enterframe-functions (in many scenarios you need to delete these)
  • missed to cleanup everything inside a lookup table making lookups slower after ~100k iterations
  • failed to successfully delete loader
  • missed tracking a setTimeout
  • adding too many items to a movieclip and not reusing old entries (same issue as lookup table)