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Feature: Task Killer

Garrett LeSage edited this page Feb 16, 2017 · 25 revisions

Purpose

Provide a way to kill tasks in Cockpit, to test garbage collection and allow a person using Cockpit to manually free up resources on the client machine (the computer running the browser) as well as the server (in tasks that require heavy IO, etc.).

This feature is meant primarily as a debugging tool.

Audience

Developers

TBD

Proposed implementation(s)

It's a common pattern to provide extended information on applications in the about box. Sometimes, this may include resources used. Andreas and I (Garrett) are looking to implement a task list where tasks can be killed inside the Cockpit about dialog.

An alternate approach would be to have a hidden keystroke to enable the ability to close running tasks from the navigation. This approach is not mutually exclusive with the about box method. However, Andreas and I (Garrett) think it's best to make an advanced feature like this a bit more hidden.

After (or while) this feature is implemented, it may be a good idea for tasks running inside of Cockpit to provide hints on whether they should persist or could be transient (recreated at each request). Lighter weight frames may then be cleaned up a bit more aggressively in the background according to some heuristic (with something like time since last used, # of tasks since last use, # of active tasks, the persistence hint, and so on).

Mockups

TBD

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