[webkit-dev] Testing worker lifecycle

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jun 25, 2009, at 2:27 PM, Drew Wilson wrote:

> (resending to a wider audience - apologies to those of you who  
> receive this twice)
> Hi all,
>
> The HTML5 worker spec has changed significantly from its earlier  
> incarnations, in that it's no longer externally visible whether a  
> given worker thread has shut down or not (there are no more close  
> events surfaced on the Worker).

What's the motivation for this particular change?

> This means that there's not currently a good way to write tests to  
> verify that workers are actually shutting down when they are  
> unreachable/idle. Do you guys have any ideas about how to address  
> this?

One obvious way would be to add a nonstandard equivalent to the  
"close" event ("webkitClose"). The downside is that this would be  
exposed to Web content.

>
> One idea I had would be to expose a WorkerController for layout  
> tests, similar to GCController - the WorkerController could expose a  
> numWorkers attribute which is incremented/decremented as worker  
> threads startup/exit. I haven't started looking into how this would  
> be done, but I figured I'd ask you guys if this was a good approach  
> or if there's a cleaner way to test these cases.

That's also possible, the downside of this approach would be that the  
tests wouldn't work in a normal browser that doesn't have the special  
DumpRenderTree APIs.

  - Maciej