[webkit-dev] Discussing bug 98539 - Refactor resource loading to allow for out-of-process loading and memory caching

[Adam Barth]

On Mon, Oct 8, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Brady Eidson <beidson at apple.com> wrote:
> On Oct 8, 2012, at 10:58 AM, Adam Barth <abarth at webkit.org> wrote:
>> When we looked at whether we should add a shared memory cache to
>> Chromium, we came to the conclusion that there wasn't much benefit to
>> having a shared memory cache.  In
>> <https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98541#c4>, you mentioned that
>> you have data showing that a shared memory cache is a win.  Would you
>> be willing to share this data with the WebKit community?
>
> It's possible the disparity is because of the process model Chromium was focusing on versus the process models we are exploring.
>
> WebKit 2 is also evolving as an API framework that supports other non-browser clients which might have different caching needs than Chromium has focused on.
>
> We don't have hard data to share at this time.  A simple experiment one could run to see the type of result we're focusing on would be to open a handful of articles from various top-tier news sites in different tabs and note just how many resources are shared between them.

Without data showing that this is a win, adding a shared memory cache
to WebCore seems like over-engineering and unneeded complexity.  We
had the same design instincts as you when we looked at this issue in
Chromium, but we studied the issue (twice actually) and concluded that
the complexity wasn't worth the meager benefits.

Adam