This comes from MDL-70014, where some (increasingly often) behat random failures were analysed.

Over the time, with the "en" lang pack growing and growing, the tool_customlang backend is becoming too much slow, requiring some good seconds (minutes with slow environments) for the initial loading of a lang pack for edition.

Right now it uses DB storage intensively for keeping the stuff there and, on every load operation, the DB and the lang files are cross-checked in order to ensure that the DB "image" is up to date.

Ideally, at some point, we should be able to improve various things there:

• Make the plugin 100% DB less.
• Provide a better, dynamic, loading of stuff using modern techniques (AJAX/WS and friends).
• Better UI to manage the translations...

Note all the above are just super-initial ideas that have been commented here and there. Sure this issue (maybe epic) requires proper planning and designing. So take this text as a simple "draft" to be removed once the issue is picked for action.

Some aspects of this refactor could exist in the current list of tool_customlang open issues. Worth iterating over it.

Ciao