Titanium SDK migration from 7 to 8 the app flow is like frames

i have application that runs on titanium 7.5.1.GA

when i tried to update to 8.0.0.GA the app is up and running on iOS

but when navigating in the application it works like frames... (specially if i opened a window with a lot of code or expensive data processing or self invoking loop .... etec)... the UI freezes untill the code execution done then it render all UI like "POFF"

the problem now that i dont know what happens....and the performance is working fine 100% on SDK 7.5.1.GA

Note : run-on-main-thread = false .... and i read that its forced to "true" by default in SDK 8 .... but what is the solution ..... my app is very big what should i do ? should i refactor all.... i dont know so much about "run-on-main-thread" in titanium.

Solution

run-on-main-thread means your business logic will run on the same thread as the UI. The reason you're seeing bad performance on SDK 8 is because that is the only option now. So no way around it.

However, this only illustrates how badly optimized your app was, and probably draining a lot of battery while running. You need to optimize your rendering of the app, and only do those things that are needed. What kind of business logic do you have in your app the phone performs so terrible? It feels like there are a lot of things that could be better, and a lot of things that could be simplified.

Couple things you can do:

tabgroups: only render the tab that is visible
pagination: don't render more than 20-30 items in a list, add dynamic pagination and only render some of the items
heavy calculations: try to avoid them at all, or store results so you only hgave to do them once. In this case refactoring can also be implemented, as a lot of times calculations in programming can be implemented in multiple ways, where some of them are MUCH HEAVIER than other simpler results.
avoid re-rendering. If you add items one-by-one to a list as opposed to all at once, you have a much lighter interface
to add to the previous point, if you use Alloy data-binding, this re-rendering (one item at a time) is exponentially bad!

There are many more optimizations you can do to make it better. If you program it well you will not notice any lag at all. I've had lists of 10.000 items where every item needed calculations (lat/lng distance calculation, title reformatting and momentjs mapping) and I was still able to render it within half a second. Of course then I dropped it back to about 100 items as 10k is useless anyways.

Besides this I cannot help you further without actually looking into your code.