Loading Lag - How to Alleviate?

I tried cacheAsBitmap and it made things worse so Im not using it.

Is object reuse super important? Specifically, does object reuse matter if I am already removing instances I'm not using? (ie I remove children and make it null inside the code) Is making a new object really too much for mobile?

And if anyone knows about the Vector.<T> formatting bug any help fixing it would be nice!

That is a common problem, and can occur for (at least) two reasons:

• It takes time to assign memory for the bitmap/data as it is created
• It takes time to transfer the bitmap data to the GPU.

My technique is to have an array of BitmapData ('cache') and keep a reference to each BitmapData in there.  When I create a new Bitmap I grab the BitmapData from the cache.  Multiple bitmaps will share the same BitmapData instance. This means that all the memory is assigned before the game starts and the slowdown doesn't happen in the game.  Something like this:

// This adds all your BitmapDatas into a cache so that they all exist in memory at the outset of the game
private var bdCache : Vector.<BitmapData> = new Vector.<BitmapData>([
     new MyBitmapData1(),
     new MyOtherBitmapData(),
     new MySpriteBitmapData(),
     ...
     new MyLastBitmapData() // These are all your different bitmap data's
]);

// To create a Bitmap at any time from the cache
var mySprite : Bitmap = new Bitmap( bdCache( 2 ) ); // Create Bitmap using MySpriteBitmapData

If you still get lag when a Bitmap is created, it will be reason 2 (takes time to transfer to GPU).  To solve this, you can place an instance of each bitmap on the stage (off the screen) before the game starts to force the bitmap into the GPU.  You may be able to remove them again on the next frame, or perhaps not (sometimes if you remove them from the stage, they are also removed from GPU - mostly depends on how much texture memory you are using on the GPU - i.e. how big your Bitmaps are).

Hope it helps,

Peter