Weekly Noise 3 Recap/Weekly Noise 4 - Hitting a roadblock

Series: worklog November 14, 2010

I ran into some issues this week. The first task that I tried to tackle was rendering a more complex background with 30+ shapes using raphael.js.

I was able to throw together a simple method for generating random curved paths for the shapes, but once I added more than three shapes, the performance dropped greatly. Even on my quad-core machine, one core pegged at 100% CPU usage and the animation started stuttering in Chrome. In Firefox, it simply crashed the browser.

After hitting this roadblock, I didn’t really work on the other tasks for the week, since this is a show-stopper. If I can’t get the performance to improve, then there isn’t really much point continuing.

I am not sure if I am just doing the animations in a really inefficient way or if the library is not meant to handle this many objects being animated at once (or a combination of both).

This week I will spend my time trying to see if I can modify my code to make it usable, if not I will probably just have to scrap the project. I looked at some other options like processing.js and <canvas> but those don’t seem to have much better performance.

Goals for the week:

• Improve performance or bust…

Time budget: 3 hours

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