Reduce reliance on ClassLoader.loadClass()?

[Don Brown <mr...@twdata.org>]

In doing some profiling of our applications that embed Felix, I'm
seeing heaps of blocking on ClassLoader.loadClass().  Obviously, a lot
of this is necessary, but I wonder if we couldn't do a better job of
not calling it when it is not?  Could we cache misses in a
copy-on-write map, avoiding any synchronization?  Since most of this
is happening on a module level, it should know if dynamic imports are
supported and if so, disable the miss cache, but for the majority of
the cases, you should be able to cache.  Even for the dynamic imports,
you could cache misses, then flush when new bundles are resolved.

Has anyone else profiled Felix?  Are there any OSGi benchmark apps available?

Don