Are there general reasons why a given script might run slower saved as an application than it does run from the script editor?
The script in question is here if you need specifics:
http://bbs.applescript.net/viewtopic.php?id=20421
I think folks were leaving the above thread alone since it was focused on Suitcase, but I was hoping at least the speed issue was something more general to AppleScript.
Hi, Calvin.
I think the answer you want is in this thread: http://bbs.applescript.net/viewtopic.php?id=19863
Sorry. That’s quite a long thread and it contains a lot of irrelevancies. But my oven started to beep as I was posting earlier on, so I had to leave it at that for a while. 
Basically, inter-application communication is very slow in Mac OS. If you simply have to run your script as an applet, and it addresses other applications such as the Finder or Suitcase, you can get back much of the nominal speed by putting the code in a script object and using the ‘run script’ command to run it.
script o
-- Script code that addresses other applications here.
end script
run script o
Although the applet issues the ‘run script’ command, it’s ‘run script’ itself that executes the code in the script object. ‘run script’ is in the StandardAdditions and there doesn’t appear to be much of a problem with OSAX - application communication speeds.
Yeah for whatever reason if I leave the scripts as “.scrpt” or whatever then when cron (via CronniX) kicks them off in the middle of the night they sometimes error-out for reasons I never understood. Saving the scripts as apps made the auto-kickoffs flawless. I try not to argue with the results. 
I’ll try your “script o” trick. Reality is these do kick-off in the middle of the night, so whether it takes 3 minutes or 30 is moot as long as I have room in my 6-hour window to do all the scripts I run overnight without them stomping on each other. 
Thanks Nigel!