Re: Images in a Multiprocess World

On 6/22/09 7:35 PM, Bobby Holley wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I put together a design document on the work I'm going to be doing on
> multiprocess image handling for Electrolysis. It's on the wiki at
> https://wiki.mozilla.org/Multiprocess_Images
> 
> I'd appreciate any input or feedback on the matter.

It's not clear to me that a shared image cache is necessary or desirable.
From the document, the main reason for a shared cache is to avoid
"downloading and decoding the same image multiple times unnecessarily
(TODO-elaborate). "

I would hope, though, that the network cache, which is planned to be shared,
would take care of making sure we don't download images twice. Is image
decoding really an expensive-enough operation that we want to add lots of
extra machinery?

I figured the major reason to share the image cache would be to avoid the
memory overhead of having the same decoded image data in multiple processes.
But I think we'd actually need to collect data about whether users would
actually end up with multiple unrelated tabs with many shared images before
trying to implement a complex shared solution.

--BDS