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Reduce VisualEditor's memory usage
Open, LowPublic0 Estimated Story PointsFeature

Description

Editing of large pages can use a significant amount of memory; a spotcheck that Max did on [[United States]] showed an increase of 121MB usage in Chrome while editing the page.

This is a concern for us for mobile in particular, as today's mobile devices have the amount of memory of computers from several years ago -- most have 1GB or 512MB (or even less), which has to house the operating system, background apps, the web browser, and the *entire* article with a richly annotated DOM.

Possible techniques for reducing memory usage were proposed at the VE mobile meeting yesterday:

  • Section editing -- if we only have to load up a single section at a time, large pages won't use up nearly as much memory. Note that on mobile we already divide the page up into sections surrounded by <div>s that can be replaced with the editable surface; the other sections on page might not even be open.
  • Limit full annotation processing to areas under active editing -- apparently it should be possible to delay some of the HTML processing on sections or even paragraphs that have not yet been edited. This might also save memory, but needs to be looked into.

Version: unspecified
Severity: enhancement

Details

Reference
bz53825

Related Objects

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Event Timeline

bzimport raised the priority of this task from to High.Nov 22 2014, 1:54 AM
bzimport set Reference to bz53825.

Not sure this is a Mobile-specific bug, but yes, very important to make progress here. I think there's likely to be some produce trade-offs that are more appropriate for the Mobile than Desktop experience, though, so certainly some of it will be…

Feel free to move this to 'general' and we'll hang some mobile-specific bugs off it that are more directly actionable.

(In reply to comment #2)

Feel free to move this to 'general' and we'll hang some mobile-specific bugs
off it that are more directly actionable.

{{Done}}

Jdforrester-WMF renamed this task from VisualEditor: Reduce memory usage to Reduce VisualEditor's memory usage.Dec 2 2014, 9:58 PM
Jdforrester-WMF set Security to None.
In T55825#558826, @brion wrote:

Feel free to move this to 'general' and we'll hang some mobile-specific bugs off it that are more directly actionable.

Have any mobile-specific bugs been identified since 09/2013? Adding task numbers is welcome.

More specific criteria and numbers are welcome / required here.
Also, should the "Epic" tag be added here?

This is a high-level tracker bug rather than a blocker; it needs child bugs with more specifics to be nominated as blockers. Consequently, we decided to remove it from the Q3 blockers list at the triage on 2015-02-11.

Deskana lowered the priority of this task from High to Low.Feb 23 2018, 5:19 PM
Aklapper changed the subtype of this task from "Task" to "Feature Request".Feb 4 2022, 11:13 AM
Aklapper removed a subscriber: TrevorParscal.