Cache module list

[PVince81]

modules.json contains the list of JS files to load, but it is parsed every time.

It might make sense to cache this list somewhere (memcache) ?

The reason we need such file is because the list is used both for PHP script loading and also by the JS unit tests. Also the file specifies the correct loading order.

@jvillafanez any suggestions on caching ?

[jvillafanez]

I'm not sure if we need to cache this. I'd expect very little gain.

If this is also limited to the customgroups code and doesn't affect to other pages (users or settings, for example), I don't think we should do anything.

If we want to cache, I think it's better to use local memory caches such as acpu or xcache, and limit to those. Redis / memcache would connect through network so I'd expect to be slower than parsing the file from the FS.

If we just want a speed boost, I think changing the format to plain PHP should do it. It might also take advantage of opcache to load the file faster under some environments (http://php.net/manual/en/intro.opcache.php). In this case I don't think we need to cache anything ourselves directly.

[PVince81]

If we change it to PHP, I still need a way to open/parse/execute this one file when running the tests from karma/jasmine, which is usually not possible 😦

[PVince81]

Might not be needed to cache it.

Best would be to have a minifier in place in which case there will be only a single file to load.

So the code in question needs to detect whether we're in debug mode or release mode.