How do I find out what is causing game to be sluggish

I'm confused because the debugger is stating my framerate is high but even while it remains high the game clearly slows down—controls sluggish and everything moving slower.

What else do I look for to monitor and troubleshoot this?

I do have one layer with "Force own texture" as I use a 'spotlight' type of effect at times. But when not in use I turn the layer invisible. If invisible does it still slow down the rendering? It can't all be from one layer with one sprite on it, can it?

This is the effect, not sure if there is any good way to do this without forcing own texture.

Invisible objects are not rendered, but transparent pixels are.

Have you isolated this effect to be causing the slowdowns? Do you remember when you started experiencing the slowdown? Try remove one thing at a time to find out exactly what is causing it.

Invisible objects are not rendered, but transparent pixels are.

Have you isolated this effect to be causing the slowdowns? Do you remember when you started experiencing the slowdown? Try remove one thing at a time to find out exactly what is causing it.

Yeah, I've been meaning to look through old events and take out unnecessary events and objects. So I'll have to do that then test out disabling different events and such.

I just thought one of these stats in the debugger would usually correlate with any issues like this.

One problem I'm having with trying to locate it is that it seems kind of random when it slows down. Seems to actually run with less problems in debugger than normal preview. I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually though...