Multiprocessing data sharing - google-chrome

I was wondering how does Google Chrome works in regards to its multiprocess architecture. From what I understand there is one process which renders everything and every page has one additional process associated with it. My question is, if a page loads 100MB picture how does it pass it to the renderer process?
In other words, what is the fastest way to pass (copy?) data from one process to another?
In yet another words, if one process produces 100 MB of data, how to let another process to read it? (Note that the data was produces after the process forked).
Edit: If the child process creates the data and the parent process doesn't know in advance the size of the data, how to pass the data from child to parent? I mean, "shared block of memory" has to created by the parent, right? So how much does the parent know how much of space to allocate?

General name for this is IPC - Inter Process Communication.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inter-process_communication
Now I do not know how chrome implements it but I hope you get the idea. If I had to choose one I'd say memory sharing or pipe but it could be (almost) any of those.

Related

Is it possible to query an IPFS network for the uptime (or at least the blocks added over a given time) of individual nodes?

I’d like to query an IPFS network for the uptime of its nodes individually. That is, over a duration d I would like to know roughly how much time a node has been participating in the network. Instead of time, I believe it’s also safe to frame this problem in terms of work and query for the number of blocks added within a time period.
Is there a way to do this?
crosspost
The short answer is not really. See the response on discuss.ipfs.io for more detail.
If you are fine with a trustful system, you can potentially expose block add data through the RPC. But, this isn't supported out of the box.
Otherwise, you'll have to resort to some kind of polling and crawling it seems.

Undetectable memory leak in vuejs application

I've been trying to resolve this problem for a while now, I even gave it a shot to rewrite the entire program but without success. The application is running on VueJS 2.3.3 and is supposed to be running on Chromium in combination with a Raspberry Pi (irrelevant information, for now).
We're working with several components which are being included in a single file, later on this file will be compiled using either gulp or npm run dev. When the instance of VueJS initializes, a request will be send using Vue Resource's $http option. This'll receive a json response with a size of around 30mb. This'll be saved in the data array, as seen here:
this.$http.get('<url>' + this.token)
.then((response) => {
this.properties = response.properties;
});
This data will later on be used for further actions, another thing that is worth mentioning is that the data is being refreshed every once in a while. Which is where I think the problem occurs, if I'm not refreshing the data every 5 minutes (can be longer too, really depends on the way I'm testing) the program runs fine. It's just that I want to refresh the data every once in a while to retrieve new information. The way of setting a timeout which I'm using is as following:
this.dataTimeout = setTimeout(this.refreshData, 300000);
Each (so called) property has at least 6 base64 images saved in it's JSON, which are later used to present to the user. Besides that, there is a name, address, and some other tiny bits of data. It doesn't sound all that wrong but I'm getting the feeling that each response makes the memory grow so intense that even a desktop is getting trouble running it.
Each 10 seconds a new property will be presented on the user's screen including the images, street, location, etc. I'm not sure if there is a memory leak in my code or if I'm forgetting something. A few questions pop up in my head:
Do I need to reset the response I'm getting from the server back to
null or undefined?
Could there be a leak in one of the plugins I'm using (Just VueResources)?
For how long can a VueJS instance stay alive, is there any recommended time to reload the entire program?
What thinks should I take in consideration in order to achieve this at all?
I've taken out the data renewal and put a demo project online, this can be seen right here. The main problem I'm having is that the browser just runs out of memory and shows us the amazing Aw snap! page from Chrome. I tried taking snapshots from the memory usage but it all seems fine, it just explodes randomly after a while.
Well, I don't know what really does your app, but are your 30Mb of data really useful / essential ? In JSON moreover ?
Maybe you don't need all this data, and you could just adapt the data to your needs. For example, keep your JSON store data, and retrieve your Base64 images by another way.
I don't understand why you store in memory images. Images are just useful for display purpose in my opinion.
So I think 30Mb is really huge. But maybe I'm wrong ?
By the way, I've tested with Firefox Nightly, no problem here. Doesn't seem to crash. Maybe I don't encounter the refresh call ?

Get all files in box account

I need to fetch a list of all the files in a user's box account, such that the list of files can then be displayed in a table view (iOS).
I have successfully implemented this by recursively using /folders/{folder id}/items on all the folder's in my user's box.
However, while this works, it's kind of dirty, seeing as how a request is made for each of the users's folders, which could be quite a large number.
Is there any way to get a list of all the files (it's no issue if folders are included, I can ignore those manually) available?
I tried implementing this using search, but I couldn't identify a value for the query parameter that returned everything.
Any help would be appreciated.
Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope.
What you are looking for (recursive call through a Box account) is not available. We have enterprise customers will bajillions of files and millions of folders. Recursively asking for everything would take too long.
What we generally recommend is that you ask for as little as you can, and that you use multiple threads and anticipate what you'll need just a little bit, so that you can deliver a high-performance user-interface to your end-users.
For example ?fields=item_collection is expensive to retrieve, and can add a lot to a paylaod. It can double, or 10x the time that it takes to get back a payload from the Box API. Most UI's don't need to show all the items inside every folder. So they are better off asking for ?fields=.
You can make your application responsive to the user if you make the smallest possible call. Of course there is a balance. Mobile networks have high latency, and sometimes that next API call to show some extra thing is slow. But for a folder tree, you can get high performance by retrieving only the current level, displaying that, and then starting to fetch one-level down while the user is looking at the first level.
Same goes for displaying thumbnails. If a user drills into a folder and starts looking at thumbnails for pictures, there's a good chance they'll want to see other thumbnails in that same folder. Your app should anticipate that, and start to pull one or two extras down in the background. Yes, it means more API calls, but your users will give your app a higher rating for being fast.

What is the most efficient way to display lots of data on a website?

I have an optimization question.
Lets say that I'm making a website, and it has a JSON file with 5,000 pairs (about 582 kb) and through the combination of 3 sliders and some select tags it is possible to display every value. So the time to appear between every pair is in microseconds.
My question is: If the website is also made to run on mobile browsers, where is it more efficient to have the 5000 pairs of data - in a JSON file or in the data base? and why?
I am building a photo site with similar requirements and I can say after months of investigations and experimenting that there are no easy answer to that question. But I will try to give you some hints:
Try to divide the data in chunks, for example - if your sliders are selecting values between 1 through 100, instead of delivering exactly what the client selected, round up a bit maybe +-10 or maybe more, that way you can continue filtering on the client side without a server roundtrip. Save all data in client memory before querying.
Don't render more than what is visible on the screen, JSON storage and filtering is fast but DOM is very slow, minimize the visible elements.
Use 304 caching - meaning - whenever the client is requesting the same data twice; send a proper 304 response with etag. For example - a good rule of thumb here is to use something you know very easily, like the max ID in the database or so to see if any new data has been updated since the last call. If not, just send 304 and the client will use whatever he had the last time.
Use absolute positioning. Don't even try to use the CSS float or something like that, it will not work. Just calculate each position of each element. This will also help you to achieve tip nr 2 (by filtering out all elements that are outside of the visible screen). You can still use CSS transitions which gives nice animations when they change sliders.
You could experiment with IndexedDB to help with the client side querying but unfortunately the support in different browsers are still not good enough plus you hit the roof on storage, better to use the ordinary cache and with proper headings.
Good Luck!
A database like MongoDB would be good for this. It still uses the JSON syntax for storage so you can use the values from the JSON file. The querying is very fast too and you wouldn't have to parse the JSON file and store it in an object before using it.
Given the size of the data (just 582Kb) I will opt for the Json file.
The drawback is you will have a penalty starting the app and loading the data in memory, but then all queries will run very fast in memory as a good advantage.
You need to think about how much acceses will your app do to the database (how many queries) against load the file just once. And think if your main objective are mobile browsers or pcs.
For this volume of data I wouldn't try a database (another process consuming resources), just try how much resources (time, memory) are needed to load the JSON file.
If the data is going to grow... then you will need to rethink this, or maybe split your json file following some criteria.

Why people always encourage single js for a website?

I read some website development materials on the Web and every time a person is asking for the organization of a website's js, css, html and php files, people suggest single js for the whole website. And the argument is the speed.
I clearly understand the fewer request there is, the faster the page is responded. But I never understand the single js argument. Suppose you have 10 webpages and each webpage needs a js function to manipulate the dom objects on it. Putting 10 functions in a single js and let that js execute on every single webpage, 9 out of 10 functions are doing useless work. There is CPU time wasting on searching for non-existing dom objects.
I know that CPU time on individual client machine is very trivial comparing to bandwidth on single server machine. I am not saying that you should have many js files on a single webpage. But I don't see anything go wrong if every webpage refers to 1 to 3 js files and those js files are cached in client machine. There are many good ways to do caching. For example, you can use expire date or you can include version number in your js file name. Comparing to mess the functionality in a big js file for all needs of many webpages of a website, I far more prefer split js code into smaller files.
Any criticism/agreement on my argument? Am I wrong? Thank you for your suggestion.
A function does 0 work unless called. So 9 empty functions are 0 work, just a little exact space.
A client only has to make 1 request to download 1 big JS file, then it is cached on every other page load. Less work than making a small request on every single page.
I'll give you the answer I always give: it depends.
Combining everything into one file has many great benefits, including:
less network traffic - you might be retrieving one file, but you're sending/receiving multiple packets and each transaction has a series of SYN, SYN-ACK, and ACK messages sent across TCP. A large majority of the transfer time is establishing the session and there is a lot of overhead in the packet headers.
one location/manageability - although you may only have a few files, it's easy for functions (and class objects) to grow between versions. When you do the multiple file approach sometimes functions from one file call functions/objects from another file (ex. ajax in one file, then arithmetic functions in another - your arithmetic functions might grow to need to call the ajax and have a certain variable type returned). What ends up happening is that your set of files needs to be seen as one version, rather than each file being it's own version. Things get hairy down the road if you don't have good management in place and it's easy to fall out of line with Javascript files, which are always changing. Having one file makes it easy to manage the version between each of your pages across your (1 to many) websites.
Other topics to consider:
dormant code - you might think that the uncalled functions are potentially reducing performance by taking up space in memory and you'd be right, however this performance is so so so so minuscule, that it doesn't matter. Functions are indexed in memory and while the index table may increase, it's super trivial when dealing with small projects, especially given the hardware today.
memory leaks - this is probably the largest reason why you wouldn't want to combine all the code, however this is such a small issue given the amount of memory in systems today and the better garbage collection browsers have. Also, this is something that you, as a programmer, have the ability to control. Quality code leads to less problems like this.
Why it depends?
While it's easy to say throw all your code into one file, that would be wrong. It depends on how large your code is, how many functions, who maintains it, etc. Surely you wouldn't pack your locally written functions into the JQuery package and you may have different programmers that maintain different blocks of code - it depends on your setup.
It also depends on size. Some programmers embed the encoded images as ASCII in their files to reduce the number of files sent. These can bloat files. Surely you don't want to package everything into 1 50MB file. Especially if there are core functions that are needed for the page to load.
So to bring my response to a close, we'd need more information about your setup because it depends. Surely 3 files is acceptable regardless of size, combining where you would see fit. It probably wouldn't really hurt network traffic, but 50 files is more unreasonable. I use the hand rule (no more than 5), but surely you'll see a benefit combining those 5 1KB files into 1 5KB file.
Two reasons that I can think of:
Less network latency. Each .js requires another request/response to the server it's downloaded from.
More bytes on the wire and more memory. If it's a single file you can strip out unnecessary characters and minify the whole thing.
The Javascript should be designed so that the extra functions don't execute at all unless they're needed.
For example, you can define a set of functions in your script but only call them in (very short) inline <script> blocks in the pages themselves.
My line of thought is that you have less requests. When you make request in the header of the page it stalls the output of the rest of the page. The user agent cannot render the rest of the page until the javascript files have been obtained. Also javascript files download sycronously, they queue up instead of pull at once (at least that is the theory).