802757 - set plugin necko priority equal to media

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(Core Graveyard :: Plug-ins, defect)

Description

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

I hope to make channel priorities a more useful attribute in necko so I'm cleaning up the priority some resource requests are classified with.

Normal resources are prioritized according to their context (high for css/js, low for images, still lower for video, lowest for background stuff like addon update checks).

The plugin API doesn't easily allow this kind of separation... a url is a url is a url - they all go in the same kind of channel.

but we know that the dominant use of the plugin api is for swf and media. So I suggest setting the priority of plugin channel requests to the same as the media value. (bug 802738 sets that at 15).

This will allow other control elements to load more effectively without being crowded out by the media element. Right now there won't be much impact at all because channel priorities are only lightly used inside necko, but there is potential to make them much more useful - so the advantage of this patch is really to just get the right meta data onto the channels so that necko can later experiment with and measure (stoneridge/telemetry) different algorithms.

Comment 1

[Benjamin Smedberg]

I'm not sure I understand completely why "SWF and media" ends up with a low priority channel. If anything I would probably put SWF loading with the same priority as CSS). The elements it loads (including videos and supporting images) should reasonably be lower priority.

Comment 2

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

(In reply to Benjamin Smedberg  [:bsmedberg] from comment #1)
> I'm not sure I understand completely why "SWF and media" ends up with a low
> priority channel. If anything I would probably put SWF loading with the same
> priority as CSS). The elements it loads (including videos and supporting
> images) should reasonably be lower priority.

my rudimentary understanding here is that css can certainly block all meaningful rendering of the page.. I thought swf was essentially just an element.

an aside because it has come up in other related discussions - we aren't talking about throttling stuff arbitrarily, these are just relative distinctions. If you could only have one first, wouldn't it be the css?

Comment 3

[Patrick McManus [:mcmanus]]

Attachment: patch 0

Comment 4

[Benjamin Smedberg]

Resolving old bugs which are likely not relevant any more, since NPAPI plugins are deprecated.