Scheduler looping with postMessage

[secretrobotron]

Alan and I talked a lot about how to spin the scheduler on task in the
Gladius scheduler, and found a hack someone discussed on a blog about
using postMessage to run faster than setTimeout(0).

We've asked a couple of browser devs here at Mozilla about it before,
but in the interest of getting the Gladius renderer right, I asked
Ehsan about this hack. He suggested posting to dev.platform.

I did so just now. It's taking a while to produce results on the
group, so look for "Looping Too Fast with postMessage" soon.

[David Humphrey]

You want to talk to David Baron (dbaron) and Boris (bz) about this:

http://dbaron.org/log/20100309-faster-timeouts

When we tried this for Processing.js we found that we could starve the
main thread with too many updates. I'd say do some solid testing before
you adopt this approach. Also talk to yury in the processsing.js
channel, as he did this research for us a year back for pjs.

Dave

[Secret Robotron]

This is exactly where we got the information to use the postMessage approach. I'll mention it in the thread when it appears.

[secretrobotron]

Here it is:

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.platform/browse_thread/thread/23e4c4134b58700d#

[David Humphrey]

Doing posts to dev.platform is smart. You'll get a response, I suspect,
and if you don't, we'll do some targeted irc work...

dave