Disable Electron spellcheck and background throttling - #2
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bb is a control plane, not a document editor. Spellcheck walks the DOM on input. Background throttling pauses token streams and query refetch when the window is occluded. Fixes get-bb#2693
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Human comments
What was wrong
The desktop shell is Chromium in front of a Node server. Spellcheck walks the DOM on every input event; bb is a control plane, not a document editor. With
backgroundThrottlingon, Chromium pauses timers in an occluded window, so token streams, reconnect, and query refetch stall.Related: get-bb/bb#2693 (Chromium main-thread cost). This PR is the two window prefs we can flip without rewriting input handling.
What changed
webPreferences.spellcheck: falseandsession.setSpellCheckerEnabled(false)on window create and context-menu register.webPreferences.backgroundThrottling: false.No protocol change. Remote-first startup was already correct (a saved Connect / custom URL skips
initializeRuntime) and is not touched here.Why this way
get-bb#2693 is broader (EventTimingProcessingEnd when input events accumulate). Turning spellcheck off removes a known DOM walk on every keystroke. Disabling background throttling keeps the control plane alive when the window is covered. Both are one-line Electron prefs.
We did not try to fix Chromium event-timing itself, and we did not change how the renderer schedules React work. Those are larger cuts.
Benefit to bb
Packaged desktop only. Less main-thread work per keystroke in the prompt box; a covered window still paints incoming tokens. Web is unchanged.
Harvest
Independent. Already opened: get-bb/bb#2934.
Decision record: docs/perf-control-plane.md (PR #9).
How you verified
apps/desktop/test/desktop-window-factory.test.tsanddesktop-context-menu.test.tsexpectspellcheck: false,backgroundThrottling: false, andsetSpellCheckerEnabled(false). 17 passed.Related: get-bb#2693, get-bb#2934