I was getting the following error while developing my doodle flash application using ActionScript 3.0:

1502 A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds.

I tracked the problem down to a piece of code that looped through a large XML document. At first I thought there was nothing I could do, but after playing about with it and pulling my hair out for a while I found out several things that helped me reduce the runtime by an impressive amount. I wanted to share my findings in case anyone else was having similar problems.

Finding 1: XML .. operator is very slow …

I've been making an animated button using a MovieClip in Flash using ActionScript 3. The problem I had was making the hand cursor appear over it, firstly at all and then when my button had text in it.

To make a MovieClip behave like a button and use the hand cursor set the following properties for the MovieClip.

clip.buttonMode = true;

clip.useHandCursor = true;

Next, if your MovieClip contains a TextField set the following property for the TextField.

clip.labelText.mouseEnabled = false;

This means that the button underneath deals with the mouse, so the cursor will behave in the way that …