I have a little html canvas app where I use kinetic js to animate a couple hundred small circles moving along individual lines. It works ok, but sometimes can be a little slow. I'd like to be able to scale it up to a few thousand, and have it update each circle on each frame. How can I make it faster? Are there better alternatives to kinetic js for this purpose? Thanks.
here's a sample: http://www.cs.middlebury.edu/~gkrathwohl/running/ncaa.html
You're not having the user interact with your runner circles.
Since you don't need interactivity provided by Kinetic.Circles, you can gain magnitudes of speed improvement by drawing all your runners on 1 single Kinetic.Shape instead of creating hundreds (thousands) of individual Kinetic.Circles.
The Kinetic.Shape gives you a context on which you can much more quickly draw non-interactive circles using native context.arc(x,y,radius,0,PI2).
If you later need interactivity, you can quickly test the mouse position vs each runner object mathematically.
Good luck with your project!