[webkit-dev] Ever increasing binary size

[Benjamin Poulain]

On Fri, Mar 22, 2013 at 12:12 AM, Ryosuke Niwa <rniwa at webkit.org> wrote:

> WebKit nightly build for r135421 dated November 21st, 2012 was 46.1MB.
> WebKit nightly build for r145786 dated March 13th, 2013 was 49.4MB.
>
> Our binary size increased by 7.2% in just 4 months.
>

I have been tracking this issue for a bit. I can send more detailed view of
the growth if anyone is interested.


> Is this a problem?  I think it is. It means that we use more RAM when
> WebKit is loaded onto memory. It means that it takes longer to load WebKit
> into RAM. It means that auto-update, etc... various browsers that use
> WebKit needs to send more data over the network.  6MB costs you a ton if
> you're wiring over cellar network.
>

RAM space is not the only problem we have with big binaries. The bigger our
code gets, the less efficiently we use the fast CPU caches and WebKit gets
slower over time overall.

On embedded, you typically have tiny caches and slower memory. This leads
to a lot of memory pressure and we had to cut binary size sometimes to get
the performance back.

What strategies can we use to address this problem?
>

I would like it if EWS could report growth and shrinkage somehow, and have
a warning in case of abnormal growth.

Benjamin
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