Details
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Improvement
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Status: Closed
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Major
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Resolution: Fixed
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1.5.9
Description
Currently the ChangeProcessor.contentChanged is in charge of doing the event diffing and filtering and does so in a pooled Thread, ie asynchronously, at a later stage independent from the commit. This has the advantage that the commit is fast, but has the following potentially negative effects:
- events (in the form of ContentChange Objects) occupy a slot of the queue even if the listener is not interested in it - any commit lands on any listener's queue. This reduces the capacity of the queue for 'actual' events to be delivered. It therefore increases the risk that the queue fills - and when full has various consequences such as loosing the CommitInfo etc.
- each event==ContentChange later on must be evaluated, and for that a diff must be calculated. Depending on runtime behavior that diff might be expensive if no longer in the cache (documentMk specifically).
As an improvement, this diffing+filtering could be done at an earlier stage already, nearer to the commit, and in case the filter would ignore the event, it would not have to be put into the queue at all, thus avoiding occupying a slot and later potentially slower diffing.
The suggestion is to implement this via the following algorithm:
- During the commit, in a Validator the listener's filters are evaluated - in an as-efficient-as-possible manner (Reason for doing it in a Validator is that this doesn't add overhead as oak already goes through all changes for other Validators). As a result a list of potentially affected observers is added to the CommitInfo (false positives are fine).
- Note that the above adds cost to the commit and must therefore be carefully done and measured
- One potential measure could be to only do filtering when listener's queues are larger than a certain threshold (eg 10)
- The ChangeProcessor in contentChanged (in the one created in createObserver) then checks the new commitInfo's potentially affected observers list and if it's not in the list, adds a NOOP token at the end of the queue. If there's already a NOOP there, the two are collapsed (this way when a filter is not affected it would have a NOOP at the end of the queue). If later on a no-NOOP item is added, the NOOP's root is used as the previousRoot for the newly added ContentChange obj.
- To achieve that, the ContentChange obj is extended to not only have the "to" root pointer, but also the "from" previousRoot pointer which currently is implicitly maintained.
