Description Thomas Watson 2007-04-18 09:24:25 EDT

PDE does a full state resolution the first time the PDE classpath container is used.  I observed this behavior while debugging bug 181327.

Here is what I think is going on (Wassim and others correct me if I'm wrong)

- PDE caches a copy of the target state which contains the BundleDescriptions of all the binary bundles in the target.
- PDE caches a copy of the workspace state which contains the BundleDescriptions of all the bundles in the workspace.
- The first time the PDE classpath container is used both the workspace and target states are read from disk into memory.
- A third state (or maybe one of the loaded states?) is used to merge the two states into one.
- A full resolution is then performed on the merged state.

This is not an issue for smaller targets (<150 like the sdk) because the resolver will do a full resolution in ~1ms per bundle.  But as your target grows into the 1000s we are talking about 1000s of ms.  To make matters worse, if you close a workspace with a PDE manifest editor open, on restart this full resolution takes place *before* the workspace is shown.  This directly affects startup performance.

Possible solutions:
- Cache the merged resolved state and only reconstruct it if you notice the target or the workspace set of bundles has changed.
- Figure out why PDE is doing full resolution at startup.  Can this be done in the background, right now it happens on the main event loop.