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I've been looking at Chrome's wonderful Heap Snapshots and started wondering if there were any experiments / ballpark measurements done about what's the "limit" for memory usage on a web page.

For example, if my heap snapshot shows a total of 10Mb, that's almost certainly not an issue on any computer made in the last 5 years.

But at what point would it be a problem for a significant portion of users? 50Mb? 100Mb? 300Mb?

Links to relevant articles would be much appreciated.

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  • what does that have to do with your users? it's just a debugging tool you use..
    – Ben
    Commented Dec 15, 2010 at 5:52
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    So Chrome lets you see how much heap space your WEBPAGE is using when you visit it. Any visitor browsing with Chrome will see a comparable about of memory being used on their computer when they open your page. And although other browsers won't match that usage, they will likely approximate it (i.e., if you can reduce footprint in Chrome, you're probably reducing it for IE and Firefox as well fingers crossed). stackoverflow.com/questions/4390222/…
    – Adam A
    Commented Dec 16, 2010 at 3:06

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I am extending Google Chrome with 3D graphics support. Due to unoptimized code my page sometimes takes several gigabytes in memory. I do not think there is a limit, except that on Windows, Google Chrome is 32-bit application, which are limited to ca. 1.3 GiB by the OS. On Linux Google Chrome is 64-bit, so limit is ca. 256 TiB (262144 GiB), which in principle means no limit at all.

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  • But this would be bad for user experience I think.
    – tster
    Commented Jan 14, 2011 at 16:03
  • Obviously I am not going to leave it this way... we are working on optimizations. However I should admit that browsers were never designed for 3D graphics and that creates a lot of problems.
    – Sergiy Belozorov
    Commented Feb 23, 2011 at 22:59

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