14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has recently announced that Windows 10 May 2020 Update ships with massive segment heap memory improvements, which allow for a substantial decrease in the amount of memory used by browsers, including here the likes of Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.
And needless to say, Microsoft Edge is the first browser to benefit from these changes, and the company claims it has observed a 27 percent improvement in the May 2020 Update.
As I said only a few hours ago, it was only a matter of time until Google discovered the refinements in Windows 10 May 2020 Update and started working on similar updates for Google Chrome.
And now it looks like Google wants to bring segment heap to Chrome too, and the company has already started the work in this regard.
“This is why we need segment heap”
In a commit spotted by WL, a Chromium engineer explains that going this route could help Chrome reduce memory usage by “hundreds of MB.”
“Adding a SegmentHeap entry to the chrome.exe manifest will tell recent-enough versions of Windows (20-04 and beyond) to opt chrome.exe into using the segment heap instead of the legacy heap. Details are in the bug but it appears that the default Windows heap is tuned for server workloads where throughput is what matters most, and Chromium (especially due to its multi-process architecture) also has to care about memory footprint,” the commit reads.
“Experiments with per-machine opting-in to the segment heap for chrome.exe suggests that this could save hundreds of MB in the browser and Network Service utility processes, among others, on some machines. Actual results will vary widely, with the greatest savings coming on many-core machines.”
Google engineers also discuss segment heap in Chrome, using Microsoft’s 27% memory improvement as living proof of “why we want the segment heap.”
“We could enable it now but that would cause build warnings. Therefore enabling it is blocked on a switch to the Windows 10.0.19041.0 SDK which is currently blocked on some mysterious build failures,” they say in a thread.
All these improvements are only possible on Windows 10 May 2020 Update devices.