On May 22, 2008, at 11:06 PM, Paul Pedriana wrote: > We are considering porting WebKit to work on gaming consoles (e.g. > XBox > 360, PlayStation 3). We want to have browsing functionality within our > games. > > The primary issue with this is likely to be one of memory. When > running > within a game, a web browser has little more than a few megabytes of > RAM > to work with, as the rest of the game will be needing the majority of > the memory. Since much of the time the user will be going to web sites > under our control (usually our own web site), we can omit browser > functionality that isn't going to be needed, such as SVG display and > support for unusual languages. Also, it's OK if some speed is > sacrificed > as a result of reducing memory requirements (e.g. for memory and font > caches). > > We have talked to commercial mobile web browser providers (like phone > browsers), and they can run in as little as 2MB of heap space for > simple > web pages, yet are standards-compliant. And our own in-house browser > which we wrote but would rather not maintain runs in as little as > 512 KB > of heap space. So we have reason to feel that < 5MB is a reasonable > target. We realize that huge pages and graphics are going to use more > memory than this baseline. > > Key question(s): What is the minimum amount of heap space that WebKit > requires in order to run? Is WebKit efficient with memory? Are we > possibly likely to have any success in this endeavor?
WebKit's memory use depends a lot on: 1) Memory use of the underlying platform libraries it is ported to. 2) Memory cache sizes (which can be tuned). 3) Which features are enabled or disabled (many are #ifdef'd). WebKit has been ported to mobile phones with very little RAM, so your project sounds feasible, but I think you'd have to test with your sites and see what you can get out of a custom build to know with more confidence. Regards, Maciej _______________________________________________ webkit-dev mailing list [email protected] http://lists.webkit.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/webkit-dev
