[webkit-gtk] Memory leaks creating and removing webviews

[Sergio Villar Senin]

En 12/06/13 20:49, Josh Rickmar escribiu:
> This issue may have already been beaten to death, but I am seeing
> pretty bad memory leaks when creating, showing and, and then deleting
> WebKitWebView widgets.  I've written and attached a very small test
> browser that will open tabs to Google's homepage, with a button on
> each tab to remove the tab and free everything in that notebook's
> page's container.  From what I can observe with top, I lose roughly 3
> MB per each tab open and close.

The thing is that if you're only using top to look for leaks then I
don't think you're using the right approach. Note that a call to free()
does not really return the memory to the OS. The standard libc allocator
will not actually free memory pages when free() is called, since that's
a costly operation. Instead, the library tracks allocations and reuses
pages for the next allocations.

The consequence is that the RSS value reported by top will never
decrease (unless the OS detects a memory shortfall and claims for some
memory pages).

This will change with the multi-webprocess architecture, as each tab
(browsing context to be more precise) will use a different webprocess,
so closing a tab will mean finalizing a process, something that
immediately returns the memory to the OS.

I am not saying that there are no leaks, but it's better to use tools
like valgrind as it can properly point to the sources of potential
memory leaks.

BR