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Bug 36956

Summary:	[plan item] Allow plug-in deactivation
Product:	[Eclipse Project] Platform	Reporter:	Jim des Rivieres <jeem>
Component:	Resources	Assignee:	Jeff McAffer <jeffmcaffer>
Status:	RESOLVED FIXED	QA Contact:
Severity:	enhancement
Priority:	P4	CC:	danjou, danrubel, dj.houghton, ezegarra, kehn, konradk, pascal
Version:	2.1	Keywords:	plan
Target Milestone:	3.0
Hardware:	All
OS:	All
Whiteboard:

Description Jim des Rivieres

2003-04-25 18:19:12 EDT

Allow plug-in deactivation. In order to scale to a large number of plug-ins, 
Eclipse does not activate a plug-in until its code is actually needed. 
However, once activated a plug-in remains active for the remainder of the 
session. Unfortunately, this means that an active plug-in will occupy memory 
space for its code and objects even if it is only used occasionally. Many 
users have sessions lasting days or weeks, and this bloat taxes processor 
memory and JVM performance. The analogy is a long play where the actors enter 
the stage on cue, but cannot leave it until the play is over. The Eclipse 
Platform should support plug-ins that can be safely deactivated when the user 
needs to recover valuable memory space. Another alternative is to provide a 
way to quietly shutdown and restart the Platform. [Platform Core, Platform UI] 
[Theme: Rich client platform]

Comment 1 DJ Houghton

2004-04-15 09:34:42 EDT

Plug-in deactivation is now a part of the SDK with the availability of the new
OSGi based runtime.

Moving to JM for comment/closure.

Comment 2 Jeff McAffer

2004-04-15 11:14:29 EDT

The new Eclipse runtime allows plugins to be stopped at various points during a 
session.  Furhter work is needed by plugins at large to become dynamic aware in 
that they should forget about plugins that are going away.  Without this, the 
memory allocated to a deactivated plugin (e.g., though its classloader) will 
not be recovered.

This work will be incremental and ongoing over future releases.