Performance reality check

Doing a reality check on JavaScript performance today. I've been running with the game loop turned off for normal development, since there's something about VMWare that makes it about 3-4 times slower in JavaScript graphic performance than a native OS. But I figured it'd be a good idea to make sure that JavaScript can even handle what we want it to do before I invest lots of (additional) time in building the editor UI. It'd really suck to write it all and then find we need to rewrite it in Flex.

So far, the results are - inconsistent. It starts out fast and then abruptly gets dog slow. Normally this would point to a memory leak (and I know there are a couple, but they shouldn't have much of an effect at the game sizes we're currently testing), but this is happening really suddenly, and often after a JavaScript error.

There're a bunch of errors too that may be masking things...I've gotta do quite a bit of debugging before we get useful results. And the profiler results are not what I expected at all - methods I thought would only be called once are being called thousands of times. Have to look into that...