Stop Coding!

Howdy, some developers are having difficulties setting up their Flex Builder projects to use HFCD. I hope to address this by producing more documentation in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I hope to use the following example to explain how to setup your projects for HFCD. It should be pretty straightforward…

This example uses one of the IBM ILOG Elixir samples, heatmap.

1. Assume that you have ILOG Elixir installed (e.g. /Applications/IBM/ILOG/Elixir 2.5). In Flex Builder, import “Existing Projects into Workspace”. Select /Applications/IBM/ILOG/Elixir 2.5/samples/heatmap. Check “Copy projects into workspace”.

2. Once the project is loaded, you should see in the HFCD console window that the heatmap project files are being ‘uploaded’ to HFCD.

[Thu Oct 22 12:40:12 EDT 2009] upload() count=2 total=541 time=1
[Thu Oct 22 12:40:12 EDT 2009] upload() count=74 total=1624755 time=66

Also, check out the project properties. Please take a look at ‘Flex Build Path’. You should see ilog-elixir.swc and ilog-elixir_rb.swc in the library path.

3. The SWC files are in /Applications/IBM/ILOG/Elixir 2.5/frameworks. But the heatmap project that you’ve just imported is in, e.g. in my case, /Users/clement/Documents/Flex Builder 3/elixir-sample-heatmap. The SWC files are explicitly specified and are not managed by the Eclipse resource manager. That means, HFCD would not know about them. In fact, any files that the project workspace does not know about would not be “uploaded” to HFCD. To address this issue, you can use the “HFCD FileSet” view.

4. Click ‘Windows’ –> ‘Other Views…’ and you should see the “HFCD FileSet’ view at the bottom. There is a pull-down menu at the top-right corner (that little inverted triangle) of the “HFCD FileSet” view. Click the pull-down menu and select ‘Add Directory’.

5. Add /Applications/IBM/ILOG/Elixir 2.5/frameworks to the “HFCD FileSet” view.

6. Go back to the pull-down menu and select “Upload Files”. This step “uploads” the SWC files to HFCD.

[Thu Oct 22 12:45:32 EDT 2009] upload() count=2 total=2486244 time=52
[Thu Oct 22 12:45:32 EDT 2009] upload() count=2 total=16330 time=2
[Thu Oct 22 12:45:32 EDT 2009] upload() count=2 total=14402 time=2
[Thu Oct 22 12:45:32 EDT 2009] upload() count=3 total=0 time=0
[Thu Oct 22 12:45:32 EDT 2009] upload() count=2 total=694230 time=14
[Thu Oct 22 12:45:32 EDT 2009] upload() count=4 total=0 time=0

The “HFCD FileSet” view will then show the number of files being “uploaded”.

Behind the scene, the files in /Users/clement/Flex Builder 3/elixir-sample-heatmap and /Applications/IBM/ILOG/Elixir 2.5/frameworks are copied to /Users/clement/.hfcd/files. It is where HFCD locates and compiles the files.

7. At this point, HFCD should have all the files it needs to compile heatmap. Now, start a new, clean build.

8. If there is nothing wrong, the heatmap app will be compiled successfully and you should see it in the “HFCD View” view.

9. Test the app by selecting ‘heatmap.html’ in the ‘bin-debug’ directory.

Hope you find this useful. Also, this previous post (http://stopcoding.wordpress.com/2009/10/09/using-flex-builder-with-hfcd) talks about the very same topic. Please check it out.

Some developers told me that they were interested in using HFCD with Flash Builder. They’ve already moved to Flash Builder beta as their primary development tool and they would really like to see HFCD support for Flex 4. I initially was a bit cautious about integrating HFCD (currently in beta) with Flex 4 (also currently in beta). But in the past couple of weeks, I looked at the compiler code in Flex 4 and thought “hey, the changes look pretty manageable”, so I took a stab at it and integrated HFCD with it.

You can now download HFCD 4 by following this link:

http://stopcoding.org/hfcd/4/download

HFCD 3 is now here:

http://stopcoding.org/hfcd/3/download

I strongly encourage you to use the installer (Mac only) because it takes care of downloading, installing, copying and configuring HFCD server, client and plugin for you. Windows folks, sorry, I’m working on the windows installer. I hope to get it out asap. BTW, the manual installation is not that bad, as long as you know how to use ant and install a plugin in Eclipse .

In my first blog post (A New Version of HFCD) of this year, I mentioned that the latest version of HFCD, currently in beta, supports out-of-process, multi-core compilation of Flex applications and libraries for Flex/Flash Builder. I am going to present some performance results here.

As you all know, Flex/Flash Builder uses an in-process compilation strategy. If there are multiple projects in the workspace, Flex/Flash Builder will build the projects sequentially. From Flex/Flash Builder’s perspective, building sequentially is a reasonable strategy because, as a GUI application, it needs to stay responsive and that means it can not use up all the available processor resources. Unfortunately, that also means, if you use a dual-core machine, Flex/Flash Builder uses one core. If you use a quad-core machine, Flex/Flash Builder still uses one core. There is no correlation between the Flex/Flash Builder build performance and the number of processor cores in your machine.

HFCD takes a totally different approach. HFCD analyzes applications’ and libraries’ dependencies in your workspace; figures out the maximum possible concurrency level and then use all the available processors** in your machine to build. This usually results in shortened project build time.

To best illustrate this idea, let’s take a look at the demos below. The workspace consists of 8 IBM ILOG Elixir demos. These projects are independent of each other.

This is considered the best-case scenario because you can reach full CPU utilization right at the start and throughout the entire build. Now, let’s check out the performance results… The last setup is almost 10X faster than the first setup, which is currently the most common setup out there!

Setup	Number of Processors	Build Time
Flex Builder 3, Flex 3.4.1	2	35s
Flex Builder 3, Flex 3.4.1, HFCD 3	2	24s
Flex Builder 3, Flex 3.4.1, HFCD 3	4	12s
Flash Builder 4, Flex 4.0.0	2	12s
Flash Builder 4, Flex 4.0.0, HFCD 4	2	7.7s
Flash Builder 4, Flex 4.0.0, HFCD 4	4	3.9s

You can see big improvement by moving from Flex 3 to Flex 4, but that does not mean that HFCD is DOA. Instead, HFCD adds performance boost on top of Flex 4! In this scenario, HFCD makes the build run 50% faster (24s vs. 35s and 7.7s vs. 12s) by using the same hardware and 3X faster (12s vs. 35s and 3.9s vs. 12s) by doubling the number of processors!

A quick note on the performance improvement in the Flex 4 compiler. The triple-digit-percentage speed-up from Flex 3 to Flex 4 (35s vs. 12s) is likely due to the use of global LibraryCache. However, if LibraryCache is shared by bigger projects, the effect of LibraryCache will be significantly reduced.

Now, before you get too excited about the potential of multi-core compilation of Flex apps, you need to understand that the project dependencies play a key role in the build performance. For example, if your project dependency graph forms a straight line, then adding more CPUs is not going to help. If one or two projects in your workspace are dominating the total build time, consider breaking them up into smaller, independent projects.

I hope you find the test results useful…

** It is possible to configure HFCD to use less than the number of available processors. This configuration is useful for those who use quad-core machines as their development platforms by setting the concurrency level to 3 or 2.

Many of you who build medium to large-sized Flex projects with Flex Builder know that you need to modify the memory settings of the JVM in FlexBuilder.ini. For example, my JVM settings in FlexBuilder.ini look like this:

-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:MaxPermSize=256m -XX:PermSize=64m

Other than having bigger -Xms and -Xmx values, it’s exactly the same as the default setting. The Flex Builder team did not arbitrarily set these values. They did not set the values for the compiler only. They set the values so that all the features in FB achieve optimal performance.

One of the arguments of using HFCD is that if you run the compiler out-of-process, you get a chance to configure the JVM for the compiler only. The HFCD installation only puts in the following default setting:

-Xms512m -Xmx1024m -XX:+UseParNewGC

I take the minimalist approach here because I want to give the HotSpot VM maximum flexibility to do its own tuning at runtime. So, does this HFCD out-of-process-compilation argument make sense? Well, let’s take a look at using Flex Builder to compile the Flex framework (a 800-file project).

Click here to read the rest of this entry.

As promised, I’m going to talk about how to install and configure the HellFire Compiler Daemon, a.k.a. HFCD. Again, if you’ve never heard of HFCD before, please check out the following posts:

1. The Flex Compiler API… RPC Style
2. A New Version of HFCD
3. HFCD Beta Is Now Available

Before you download HFCD, make sure you meet the following system requirements:

• Java 5 installed (Java 6 highly recommended). BTW, Flex Builder ships with JRE 5. It’s okay to use that, but the point of using HFCD is build Flex apps faster… and Java 6 is *faster* than Java 5…
• Apache Ant installed. Mac OS X ships with Ant. If you use Windows, go download it at http://ant.apache.org.

Now, go to http://stopcoding.org/. Register and download hfcd_3.zip. The installation consists of 2 parts:

1. Install the HFCD server and client SDK. In this step, you need hfcd_3.zip.
2. Install the HFCD for Flex Builder plugin. In this step, you install the plugin via the Eclipse/Flex Builder Update Manager.

Click here to read the rest of this entry.