Resources and Memory Allocation in Plugins

Quote from angriff

I have a question about plugins and if there several plugins that load the same API codes . are they uploaded once or multiple times for each plugin reference in memory?

What you mean by "load the same API code"? the import statement? import's are not "loaded" and do not occupy memory at run time, they are only used at compile time to resolve external identifiers.

Quote from angriff

Also I see that area protection and some third party plug-ins load tons of lines in the logs that appears to slow down boot into the game

I do not understand what you mean here: which "lines" the plug-ins "load" and how could this "slow down boot into the game"?

(Incidentally: the current Area Protection script is not Java but LUA and, as such, none of this discussion applies to it.)

Quote from angriff

Minos reply excerpted.

To be able to use all the classes of a package you need to import it as java.sql.* so that the import includes all the classes of the package and not just one.

having said that though it is not good practice to import huge packages if you are only going to use 3-4 classes thereof

Yes, this is not considered good practice or good coding style. However, import's have no impact on memory.

Quote from angriff

I also create a lot of little plugins for my server that use common libraries.

"Lots of little plug-ins": this may have an impact on load time (and marginally on memory occupation). If a plug-in is split into two covering the same functionality, loading will require more file accesses and so on and will be (slightly) slower. Each plug-in also has some standard boilerplate contents and some "architectural sugar" which needs to be repeated for each plug-in. So, excessive fragmentation may be a (small) problem, if does not correspond to a functional separation.

"Common libraries": what do you mean by this? Which libraries beyond the Java own libraries and the RW API jar (both of which are loaded always but only once for the whole RW process)?

If you add third party libraries (which probably you cannot install in the Java VM of a commercial game server host), this may affect loading time and memory occupation (it shouldn't affect performance: if the methods you use from them are really needed, that CPU load is going to happen anyway...).