[Scummvm-devel] Dynamic Plugins (uncached) - optimization

[Johannes Schickel]

On 01/25/2014 07:10 PM, sunmax at libero.it wrote:
> Hi there Team,
>
> we are still forced to release a "static" (with the plugins linked in) binary
> at least on PS2, since detecting & adding new games with an uncached dynamic
> plugins setup is painstakingly slow... It takes 2-3 minutes we bad luck, and
> you can go for an expresso coffee every time you add a new games ;-)
>
> Uncached is the best setup, as it boots much faster and doesn't load all the
> plugins at start (which spoils the benefit of saving memory), so I thought of a
> possible small change which will givee us the best of all worlds: fast start,
> low memory usage, fast add of new games.
>
> I noticed that most of the times I name the directory containing the games,
> with the actual "gameid" (as per scummvm.ini), e.g. I have "The Dig" in "dig",
> "Broken Sword 2" in "sword2", and so on.
>
> If I have multiple versions, I append the extra portion at the end, e.g.
> "monkey2-amiga".
>
> For all these cases, we can use a simple optimization, which will really make
> a difference:
>
> "if the folder name we are adding a game from, starts with a gameid, try the
> matching engine plugin first"
>

But to know which plugin supports which gameid we would still need to 
load all plugins? I don't really see how that would be faster than using 
cached plugin mode in the first place (note that even for cached plugin 
mode it will unload all except the one it actually needs when running a 
game, so memory usage is only higher in the launcher/detection compared 
to uncached).

// Johannes