An Investigation Into The Memory Consumption of Web Browsers and A Memory Profiling Tool Using Linux Smaps

Web browsers are notorious for consuming large amounts of memory. Yet, they have become the dominant framework for writing GUIs because the web languages are ergonomic for programmers and have a cross-platform reach. These benefits are so enticing that even a large portion of mobile apps, which have to run on resource-constrained devices, are running a web browser under the hood. Therefore, it is important to keep the memory consumption of web browsers as low as practicable.

In this thesis, we investigate the memory consumption of web browsers, in particular, compared to applications written in native GUI frameworks. We introduce smaps-profiler, a tool to profile the overall memory consumption of Linux applications that can report memory usage other profilers simply do not measure. Using this tool, we conduct experiments which suggest that most of the extra memory usage compared to native applications could be due the size of the web browser program itself. We discuss our experiments and findings, and conclude that even more rigorous studies are needed to profile GUI applications.