Re: Plugin threading model in Electrolysis

Zack Weinberg wrote:
> Chris Jones <[email protected]> wrote:
>> We can implement the rendezvous by creating a heartbeat timer in the 
>> plugin process that fires at X Hz (X might be 120).  When that timer 
>> fires, we know that the plugin is idle and ready to receive messages. 
>> So the timer callback sends a Rendezvous() message to the browser,
>> and if the browser has outstanding events in its queue, it processes
>> them normally.  Otherwise, the browser responds to the Rendezvous() 
>> immediately, and the rendezvous is a no-op.
> 
> This is going to do bad things for power saving.  Can't we find a
> solution that lets the plugin process go completely idle (== block on
> select() or equivalent indefinitely) when there's nothing to do?
> 

It's probably possible somehow to notify the child process when the 
parent has events to deliver to it.  Having the child wait on data being 
sent to a pipe would probably work; the parent would send a byte to the 
pipe when it received an event to be delivered.

Cheers,
Chris