1178972 - We need a way to postpone execution of non-critical code that could hurt 60fps when it's needed

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Toolkit :: General, defect)

Description

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

In some cases, we know that we should prioritize 60fps. For instance, when we're scrolling, or when we're playing an animation and we are pretty sure that the user is watching the screen, etc.

In such cases, we want to be able to postpone any non-critical call that could block the main thread and lose frames. Examples:
- Session Restore data collection;
- Session Restore sending data to disk;
- Thumbnails capture;
- Thumbnails writes to disk;
- Garbage-collection;
- Preferences flush;
- ...

For this purpose, we need an API that would let us postpone a task until we are sure that we are not in a performance-critical section.

Comment 1

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

See bug 1219145 for a discussion on how we could get the necessary information.

Comment 2

[Dan Mosedale (:dmosedale, :dmose)]

I'm assuming the idleDispatch stuff described in https://ehsanakhgari.org/blog/2017-06-02/quantum-flow-engineering-newsletter-11 means that this can be closed.  Yoric?

Comment 3

[David Teller [:Yoric] - still alive but not very active]

Indeed.