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Why is your web browser using so much memory?

Published:15 June 2012Publication History
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Abstract

Browsers are the operating systems of the Web. They support a vast universe of applications written in a modern garbage-collected programming language. Browsers expose a rich platform API mostly implemented in C++. Browsers are also consumer software with low switching costs in an intensely competitive market. Thus in addition to standard requirements such as maximizing throughput and minimizing latency, browsers have to consider issues like-when the user closes a window while watching Task Manager, they want to see memory usage go down. Browsers have to compete to minimize memory usage even for poorly written applications. In this talk I will elucidate these requirements and describe how Firefox and other browsers address them. I will pay particular attention to issues that we don't know how to solve, and that could benefit from research attention.

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  1. Why is your web browser using so much memory?

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM SIGPLAN Notices
      ACM SIGPLAN Notices  Volume 47, Issue 11
      ISMM '12
      November 2012
      136 pages
      ISSN:0362-1340
      EISSN:1558-1160
      DOI:10.1145/2426642
      Issue’s Table of Contents
      • cover image ACM Conferences
        ISMM '12: Proceedings of the 2012 international symposium on Memory Management
        June 2012
        152 pages
        ISBN:9781450313506
        DOI:10.1145/2258996

      Copyright © 2012 Author

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      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 15 June 2012

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