Gemini and the promise of a small browser

[skyjake]

On 4. Jan 2021, at 18:07, Stephane Bortzmeyer <stephane at sources.org> wrote:

> Lagrange is nice but why does it use so much memory?
> 
> USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
> stephane 20323  2.8 37.0 1215832 1146444 ?     Sl   17:01   0:06 lagrange
> stephane  3292  2.7  6.8 738116 211084 ?       Sl   08:36  13:57 /usr/lib/firefox-esr/firefox-esr -contentproc -childID 2 -isForBrowser -prefsLen 1 -prefMapSize 232533 -parentBuildID 20201207224150 -appdir /usr/lib/firefox-esr/browser 3147 true tab

There is certainly room for improvement in the memory use department.

Possible reasons:

* Bugs. I wouldn't rule out a memory leak or too lazily freed buffers somewhere.
* Aggressive buffering of visible content. Copies of the visible regions of the page and sidebars (with 50% extra) are kept in memory for quick redrawing.
* Custom text rendering. All the fonts are loaded to memory (19 MB of TTF data), and furthermore there is quite a large cache of used glyphs for quickly drawing them.
* The navigation cache is kept in memory, including full contents of gemtext pages.
* Something I've overlooked? I'll investigate...

--jaakko