I have spent a lot of time this quarter working on bug 998863, “Asynchronous Initialization of Out-of-process Plugins.” While the bug summary is fairly self explanatory, I would like to provide some more details about why I am doing this and what kind of work it entails. I would also like to wrap up the post with an early demonstration of this feature and present some profiles to illustrate the potential performance improvement.

Rationale

The reason that I am undertaking this project is because NPAPI plugin startup is our most frequent cause of jank. In fact, at the time of this writing, our Chrome Hangs telemetry is showing that 4 out of our top 10 most frequent offending call stacks are related to plugin initialization and instantiation. Furthermore, creating the plugin-container.exe child process is the #1 most frequent chrome hang offender (Note that our Chrome Hang telemetry consists entirely of Windows builds, where process creation is quite expensive).

A High-level Breakdown of NPAPI Initialization and Instantiation

The typical steps involved can be broken down as follows:

1. Launch the plugin-container process;
2. Call NP_Initialize to load the plugin;
3. Create instances by calling NPP_New;
4. Call NPP_NewStream for instances that load stream data;
5. If an instance is scriptable, call NPP_GetValue to obtain information about the plugin’s scriptable object.

The patch that I am working on modifies steps 1 through 4 to run asynchronously. Step 5 is a special case — we asynchronously return a proxy object, but if a synchronous JS method is called on that object, we must wait for the plugin to initialize (if it has not yet done so). My hope is that if we have to call a synchronous JS method on the proxy object, plugin initialization will be far enough along that the wait will be minimal.

A Brief Demonstration

The following video compares two locally-built Nightlies that are identical except for the asynchronous initialization patch. After loading the browser with a page containing several embedded Flash objects, we can profile and observe the effects of this patch.

Here are links to some profiles:

Synchronous Plugin Initialization

Asynchronous Plugin Initialization

Disclaimer

This patch requires some further work on scripting and stabilization. The information in this post is subject to change. :-)