WebKit Apocrypha

A goal of mine is to decrease and limit the memory usage of WebKit. In embedded environments, memory can be even more important than performance. I was interested how can the memory consumption be lowered with the functionality already present in WebKit's code base, i.e., without too much hacking of the code.

I experimented with QtWebKit, revision 42745. In main(), I found two method calls that set up the resource cache of WebKit. These can be used to disable the cache:


QWebSettings::setMaximumPagesInCache(0);
QWebSettings::setObjectCacheCapacities(0, 0, 0);


The effect of this modification was measured on an x86-linux box. (First, I did the measurement on a vanilla QtWebKit, but since WebKit is leaking and shows a constantly growing memory consumption, I had to apply a patch to fix the issue. Then, I kept using this patch in all measurements.) In the measurements, I compared the maximum resident set size (maxRSS) of QtLauncher executed with caches enabled and disabled (as given above).

I measured two scenarios: in the first, I loaded 5 pages in a loop (1, 2, 3, 4, 5), while in the second, I loaded 170 pages one after the other (they were collected from Alexa by recursive webcrawling).

So, it seems that disabling the cache can save us ~6MB of memory.

(PS: Interestingly, when the leak-fixing patch was not applied to the code, disabling the cache had no effect on the maxRSS.)