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 > > > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ Chromium Developers mailing list: chromium-dev@googlegroups.com View archives, change email options, or unsubscribe: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---