Some Eclipse Foundation services are deprecated, or will be soon. Please ensure you've read this important communication.

Bug 37660

Summary: [plan item] Improve PDE model implementation
Product: [Eclipse Project] PDE Reporter: Jim des Rivieres <jeem>
Component: UIAssignee: PDE-UI-Inbox <pde-ui-inbox>
Status: RESOLVED FIXED QA Contact:
Severity: enhancement    
Priority: P4 Keywords: plan
Version: 2.1   
Target Milestone: 3.0 M8   
Hardware: All   
OS: All   
Whiteboard:

Description Jim des Rivieres CLA 2003-05-15 10:34:42 EDT 
Improve PDE model implementation. PDE lazily builds detailed models of plug-
ins, plug-in fragments, features, extension point schemas. Once loaded, these 
models are kept in memory until shut down. This approach does not scale up to 
working with large numbers (1000s) of plug-ins. PDE model elements should be 
changed to use lightweight handle objects, backed by detailed models which are 
loaded and unloaded as required.
Comment 1 Wassim Melhem CLA 2004-03-23 22:14:04 EST 
The main problem for the huge consumption of memory is the fact that PDE keeps 
the internal structure of all extensions in the target platform.  This could 
be potentially huge.  Just think of what the content of 
an "org.eclipse.ui.actionSets" extension looks like.

PDE now keeps a lightweight representation of extensions in the target 
platform.  We only keep the "point", "id", "name" attributes and we discard 
the rest.  This is enough to to do searches and all other activities that 
require knowledge of extensions.