Adobe Flex 3 introduces the much needed, and highly welcomed Flex Profiler which allows Flex and AIR application to be thoroughly examined to measure code performance and determine potential so called “memory leaks” (not that such a thing exists – it’s called a programming error, but that’s a whole other subject in itself). Flex 3.0 provides a new profiling perspective which contains all of the tools one might expect from a high quality profiling utility. I highly recommend taking advantage of the profiler and utilizing it as a powerful addition to your Flex workflow.

Even with all of the great features available in the Profiler I still find it useful to have the ability to monitor code performance in ActionScript, especially when determining the elapsed duration of service invocations. With this in mind I developed a simple API which allows developers to measure the performance of their code as it executes; such as loops, method invocations, service invocations and so forth.

The Execution class provides an intuitive API (defined by IExecutable) from which the elapsed time of a code execution, as well as the total duration of a code execution can be measured. This can be accomplished in as little as 2 lines of code. The underlying implementation is simple and the higher level API makes it easy to use.

Typically developers should utilize the Execution API as a development aid as it is intended for use in dev environments. All references should be removed prior to an actual prod release as there is no need to compile the code into your release swf.

Below I have provided links to the Execution API resources as well as documentation which contains comprehensive use-case examples.

Execution API
IExecutable
Execution