A New Memory Tool for the Web
Over at the Mozilla Developer Tools Lab, we’re starting work on a new tool to help web developers understand what’s going on with the memory management of their application:
So how does a developer troubleshoot memory problems? There’s only one way good way to do it: use the operating system’s tools. Unfortunately, this option doesn’t provide the right level of detail; you can either see how much memory the browser is consuming in aggregate (which is fine to let you know that your memory use is increasing, but doesn’t tell you why) or you can see which data structures in the browser itself are consuming the memory (which is fine if you understand the guts of the browser, but it’s pretty hard for anyone else to understand how this maps into the web application they’ve developed).
What’s missing is a tool targeted at web developers that makes it easy to understand what’s happening with their application’s memory usage. We propose to create such a tool.
Check out the full entry over at my blog for more on the motivations inspiring us to tackling this problem and for details on the first phase of this approach. Let us know what you think!
