Hi folks! Dominator trees give you fine-grained insight into memory retention.
In a graph rooted by some node R, a node A is said to dominate B iff every path to B starting from R passes through A. In the context of a heap graph, another way to say this would be that A is retaining B: if the garbage collector found A to be unreachable and eligible for reclaiming, than B would also be unreachable and eligible for reclaiming. We also use this to calculate the "true" memory cost of a node in the heap graph. This is the "retained size" and contrasts with the naive "shallow size". For example, imagine a large binary tree where there are no outside references into subtrees, only to the root. The root node itself has a small shallow size: a left branch pointer, a value, and a right branch pointer. However, it is retaining the whole rest of this large tree's structure, and so its retained size is significant. Here is a screenshot of the dominator tree (combined with allocation stack tracking) in action to debug the memory overhead of loading large source files in a CodeMirror editor: http://i.imgur.com/sGsVJb9.png And here is a reminder of how to enable to memory tool within the devtools: http://i.imgur.com/hEPTqrT.png If you would like to use this tool for the whole runtime rather than scoped to a single tab, use the browser toolbox. Here are instructions for enabling and using the browser toolbox: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Browser_Toolbox Please try it out, give me your feedback, and file bugs in the "Firefox" product and "Developer Tools: Memory" component! My thanks to the folks who reviewed patches for this feature: Jordan Santell, Steve Fink, Boris Zbarsky, and Jim Blandy. Cheers, Nick _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
