On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 6:38 PM, Evan Martin <e...@chromium.org> wrote:
>
> I'd been sending this sort of stuff to Dean and John but maybe other
> people will find it interesting.
>
> Plugin loading works in two phases:
> - at startup, we scan the plugin directories for metadata, like plugin
> names and which mime-types they apply to;
> - at runtime, when we're asked for a specific plugin by mime type, we
> open the appropriate library and have at it.
>
> On Windows and Mac, the startup step queries file metadata (version
> info on Windows, plists on Mac).
> On Linux, that step must dlopen() the plugin and poke a function in
> it. This means if a plugin ends up getting used we open it twice,
> which is especially brutal because Flash can take multiple seconds to
> open for me (complicated story, Adobe is working on it).
>
> It appears that Mozilla (maybe for similar reasons) caches this info
> across browser runs and relies on the file mtime to see when its cache
> has expired, much to some users' dismay:
> https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=125469
> Or at least they did in 2002. ;)
>
> For now (for test_shell) I think I'll just pay the double-load cost.
I think that's the way to go. Also, in the future you'll really be
opening it in another process, so you'll have to open it twice
anyways...
> The alternative is leaving plugins open, which I think wastes memory
> and hurts load time. At some point we'll have to look at performance
> and decide about the cache thing.
I don't think you'd ever want to do this, because of memory as you say.
>
> PS: Do we scan for plugins on a background thread in the normal
> browser startup?
yes
> If so, how do we prevent races between that scan and
> someone's home page requesting a plugin?
PluginService has a lock around PluginList
>
> >
>
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