[webkit-dev] memory consumption

[Maciej Stachowiak]

On Jul 2, 2008, at 1:18 PM, Paul Pedriana wrote:

> For our uses and a lot of other non-PC uses, memory is more important
> than speed. The memory budget we are targeting is <= 10 MB for code 
> +data
> to display a small blank visual page that executes a 'hello world'  
> type
> JavaScript function. So 8MB is a lot.

Keep in mind, it is 8MB of reserved VM address space, not 8MB of  
actual memory committed. This might be a problem on operating systems  
with no virtual memory, but many modern embedded OSes do support it.  
See Darin's message for more details.

> I'm wondering if there is a way to control the memory/speed tradeoff.
> The tcmalloc memory allocator makes a similar tradeoff whereby it uses
> more memory to gain speed, whereas a non-PC application would usually
> want to use a more traditional allocator + small block allocator.

I don't think that is entirely accurate. We have found that with the  
new memory returning support TCMalloc often uses less memory than  
allocators where the primary goal is memory use rather than speed.

Regards,
Maciej