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  • Michael Catanzaro's avatar
    Reduce unnecessary trust list creation · 5f469123
    Michael Catanzaro authored and Marge Bot's avatar Marge Bot committed
    We have discovered that trust list initialization is a massive
    performance bottleneck when loading websites:
    
    https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=251336
    https://gitlab.com/gnutls/gnutls/-/issues/1528
    
    At first, I thought there was not much we can do about this, because the
    gnutls_certificate_credentials_t object takes ownership of the
    gnutls_x509_trust_list object that we pass to it, meaning we definitely
    need to create a new trust list each time we create a new credentials
    object. But I eventually realized that we can safely cache and reuse the
    gnutls_certificate_credentials_t instead.
    
    With this, we now only need to populate the trust list twice per
    connection.
    
    We need to do it twice because we cannot share the priv->trust_list that
    we use in g_tls_database_gnutls_verify_chain() with the one that is given
    to the credentials object, since, again, the credentials object takes
    ownership.
    
    We could alternatively always create priv->credentials when initializing
    the database and instead create priv->trust_list lazily only when the
    first first verify_chain() operation is requested, which would get us
    down to one initialization in the usual case. (Normally, the application
    will never call g_tls_database_gnutls_verify_chain(), because
    GTlsConnectionGnutls will never do this, because it defers certificate
    verification to the GTlsDatabase only when it is not a GTlsDatabaseGnutls).
    But I think it's slightly easier to read this way. Twice isn't so bad.
    We can always change it in the future if desired, but it would have the
    disadvantage that the GTlsDatabaseGnutls's private data would no longer
    be read-only after initialization, which doesn't seem worth it. That
    rule makes it easier to reason about correctness.
    
    Part-of: <!249>
    5f469123