Re: Extensions Infrastructure Work

[Milan Bouchet-Valat <nalimilan club fr>]

Le jeudi 23 juin 2011 à 22:00 +1200, John Stowers a écrit :
> On Thu, 2011-06-23 at 11:48 +0200, ecyrbe wrote:
> > thank you john for the bits of history of the design.
> > i do know about server programming, as in fact it's my job to make
> > high load servers in c++.
> > i also understand the design better and the solution you try to
> > provide.
> > 
> > as i said. you can make the server lightweight inside the shell, i
> > don't think people would complain as this would make it a lighter
> > solution than a separate daemon.
> > The problem with a separate daemon, is that you end up using a process
> > to do nothing 99% of the time. integrating it in the shell would make
> > it :
> > - leightweight -> you only add a listening port to gnome-shell.
> > - integrated -> you don't need to add a dbus api to control extension
> > enabling/disabling
> > - easy to implement -> you only have to use libsoup asynchronously, no
> > threading use
> > - no memory overhead -> it's integrated in the shell , you don't have
> > to allocate a new stack for it
> > 
> > so, why not integrate it? why would people complain ?
> 
> Cool. As an engineer you probably also understand that one does not
> always start with the perfect implementation.
> 
> Pragmatically the separate process HTTP server is not bad for a first
> go.
> 
> I'm still not convinced a process that is sleeping 99% is a big deal. It
> should be swapped out and take no resources.
On the plus side of the out-process approach, if we switch to systemd to
handle the whole user session, the HTTP daemon will merely register the
port, and would never be started until actually used. So, if you want to
discuss theoretical details of a few kB of RAM, you also need to
consider this possibility. ;-)


Cheers