Has anyone done much research into tipping points for display performance ? I've just started trying to put more thought into it.

Good practices for performance
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Preassign all GUI.widget("NAME") to an array or activity level variable. Searching the widget list every time on complicated pages is probably expensive

If you can test a currentvalue/lastvalue and determine whether a widget or label needs to be updated, it's cheaper than just doing the update.


I'd love to hear others...

For example, I have a 500+ item list which I'm allowing one to scroll through using the scroll ring. The display shows 7 items at a time, a scroll bar, and some data for each item. One of the ways I show the data for a particular item is as an icon. For example, I have 4 different icons per item, so there are 16 permutations.

Originally, I had each of the 4 permutations individually enabled(visible)/disable(.visible=false). Basically, 28 changes in visibility every update. I noticed my scroll speed started to become choppy.

I generated 16 icons for the permutations and used setImage and an index and it's significantly faster. Imagesize is 40x40 with RGBA. One other option would be to actually stack 16 permutations per item and have two visibility operations per item. I would likely need to avoid searching the widget list everytime I wanted to do something.

Another thing that comes to mind - is it cheaper to move a panel on/off the screen versus setting visibility ?