Jan is currently working on a "Monitor" panel within the app manager, to allow seeing live profile of any data that can help debugging performances on devices. This new tool needs an actor to live stream data from device to the app manager. In a first iteration, it would just forward any observer notification being sent to it. Given that this actor is meant to debug performances, I think we shouldn't be using protocol.js for this actor as using it seriously increase memory usage of the debugger server (see bug 1012988)

Here I'm introducing yet another unsollicited event, we may want to fix bug 797621 to end this practice... Otherwise, this patch is a team work. Paul wrote a first version using protocol.js, Jan tweaked it and I translated it to old fashion actors and wrote tests.

Thanks for uploading this! I ended up doing some changes locally to get it to work, here is an interdiff from your patch right here to mine. (My patch is an aggregate of the two commits de20d72b01 and cfaf14c8d3 in https://github.com/jankeromnes/gecko-dev/commits/monitor4)

Comment on attachment 8440967 [details] [diff] [review] actor.interdiff Review of attachment 8440967 [details] [diff] [review]: ----------------------------------------------------------------- Here are the changes I made to the actor to make it work. Please feel free to argue / disregard / accept / comment on them. ::: actor.1 @@ +112,5 @@ > + > + observe: function (subject, topic, data) { > + if (topic == "devtools-monitor-update") { > ++ try { > ++ data = JSON.parse(data); When someone (e.g. me) forgets that observer notifications use strings exclusively, this line throws. Catching it and displaying a sensible error might help future offenders notice their mistake faster. @@ +160,1 @@ > + this.registerModule("devtools/server/actors/monitor"); (interdiff looks confusing here) You're adding the monitor actor in addBrowserActors(), whereas I need it to be in addTabActors().

Rebased.

Rebased to use the helper. https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=ba6e5b837e49

Those Try oranges look real, no?

The previous try was orange as I was also testing bug 1025828, which had a failure and has been fixed in the meantime. New try with just the necessary dependent patches (already on fx-team): https://tbpl.mozilla.org/?tree=Try&rev=ba6bc5e6ed9f

That's green with the updated (already landed now) dependent patches.