> I find that the image loading + Bitmap generation takes about 0.1 to > 0.2 seconds per image for the first ~50 images (this is fine because > the animation frame rate is set to 0.5 seconds per image, so the > loader keeps up), but after image 60+ it can take 3-5+ seconds per > image, which becomes problematic!
It sounds as if you may be running into memory issues. How large are your images (dimensions)? After 60+ images you may be getting a delay as memory starts to swap to/from virtual memory to service the allocation of the bitmap data. One way to work around this would be to ditch older images... of course, if the user wanted to loop or control the playback, this would be problematic, but depending on the UI scenario you may be able to rely on the browser's cache. You could also potentially generate a FLV on the server based on the images the user requests. I know you can use ffmpeg (I think) to generate FLVs, perhaps you can also use it to generate a FLV based on an image sequence. You could then just stream the FLV to them, which would internally (and natively) handle on the memory issues more efficiently and gracefully). Troy.
