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Most modern browsers cache a lot of data in memory as well to make things like navigating back snappy and avoiding a full page re-load. It's also necessary to c
by ygra 7y ago
Most modern browsers cache a lot of data in memory as well to make things like navigating back snappy and avoiding a full page re-load. It's also necessary to cache most of the state of the previous page to allow retaining form fields if you accidentally navigated away (as some forms are only in the DOM, created by JS, and not part of the original HTML).
I believe to have read somewhere that at least Chrome listens to low-memory situations broadcast by the OS and will evict such caches. So while it uses a lot of memory as long as memory is available, it will also release much of it if necessary.
- PeCaN 7y agoThis makes sense but is somewhat annoying since a web browser is not the only program running on my computer (but apparently wants to be) and eats up RAM that could be used for the OS file cache. I wish there was some sort of allocation API specifically for allocating caches so that recently accessed files could kick out a web browser's cache of a not-so-recently accessed tab or vice versa.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- nitrogen 7y agoPOSIX does have something sort of like this in madvise(), but I couldn't find a specific option for the semantics you described.