Compartmental Memory Management in a Modern Web Browser

作者：Wagner Gregor^*; Gal Andreas; Wimmer Christian; Eich Brendan; Franz Michael

来源：ACM Sigplan Notices, 2011, 46(11): 119-128.

DOI：10.1145/2076022.1993496

• Design
• Performance
• Experimentation
• Web-Browser Architecture
• Isolation
• Memory Management
• Garbage Collection

Since their inception, the usage pattern of web browsers has changed substantially. Rather than sequentially navigating static web sites, modern web browsers often manage a large number of simultaneous tabs displaying dynamic web content, each of which might be running a substantial amount of client-side JavaScript code. This environment introduced a new degree of parallelism that was not fully embraced by the underlying JavaScript virtual machine architecture. We propose a novel abstraction for multiple disjoint JavaScript heaps, which we call compartments. We use the notion of document origin to cluster objects into separate compartments. Objects within a compartment can reference each other directly. Objects across compartments can only reference each other through wrappers. Our approach reduces garbage collection pause times by permitting collection of sub-heaps ( compartments), and we can use cross-compartment wrappers to enforce cross origin object access policy.

• 出版日期2011-11