Web Apocrypha

In this post I would like to share with you one of my latest memory consumption measurements about the heap usage of QtWebKit.
We have a nice extension for Valgrind called Freya which is capable of measuring used memory in per directory. So, I decided to make measurements about the distribution of memory consumption in JavaScriptCore and WebCore and publish the results about the peak memory usage and the overall memory usage.

64 bit systems allow allocating more memory, but this extra space has a trade-of: the pointers are grown to 64 bit wide which increases the total memory consumption. Ever wondered about the price of 64 bit? Well, you can find comparisons here about some popular pages on the Qt port of WebKit. Furthermore, we offer some CSS subsystem related comparisons at the end of the post.

It is time to try out my new freya tool. Only some web-sites and a fresh Qt (4.6.0) and QtWebKit (r51481) are needed. The values are peak memory consumptions, which is not necessary the best choice (since the sum of their total value is greater than the peak memory consumption), but at least we can see the memory hungry parts of QtWebKit.