[webkit-dev] WebKit memory instrumentation

[Adam Barth]

Is there no way to use the sizeof operator to help?  That might not help if
we restructure the data, but it would at least help us track the size of
individual objects.

Adam


On Mon, Jul 23, 2012 at 8:09 AM, Yury Semikhatsky <yurys at chromium.org>wrote:

> *Hi WebKit,
>
> Almost all developers would like to know why the render process takes so
> much memory. We are trying to address this problem by providing an
> information on how much memory is consumed by some high-level WebKit
> parts(DOM, CSS, JavaScript etc) . Currently there is  a real-time chart in
> Web Inspector that shows the render process memory broken down into several
> components:
>
>
> To achieve that we instrumented several classes in WebCore<http://code.google.com/searchframe#search/&q=reportMemoryUsage%20package:chromium&type=cs>to report an estimation of their memory footprint. The main problem with
> that approach is that it can be easily broken by changes to the
> instrumented clasess. We need a way to guard from such changes that would
> automatically validate the instrumentation and make sure it matches current
> class structure.
>
> We see several ways of doing that.
>
> First option we consider is to define a class with the same set of fields
> as the instrumented one, then have a compile time assert that size of the
> reference class equals to the size of the instrumented one. See
> https://bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=153479&action=review for more
> details.
>
> Pros: compile time error whenever size of an instrumented class changes
> with the appropriate modifications to the instrumentation function.
> Cons: it will require each committer to adjust the reference class and the
> instrumentation on any modification that affects size of the instrumented
> class. Changes that don't affect size of the class will go unnoticed.
>
> The second option is to write a tool/script/llvm-plugin and use it on a
> build-bot to monitor the relevance of instrumentation and update it on when
> a new field is added to an already instrumented class. However, a question
> remains who and how often would do this.
> Pros: a committer may not need to update the instrumentation immediately.
> Cons: the instrumentation may be behind the actual memory usage. An
> addifitional effort required to create the tooling.
>
> We would like to know what you think about it and will greatly appreciate
> any ideas and suggestions.
>
> Regards,
> Yury, Alexei, Ilya
> *
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