Chrome 85 to disable the Windows 10 segment heap memory mechanism

Earlier, we reported that the Google Chrome development team is testing Microsoft’s new segment heap memory mechanism in Windows 10 Version 2004.

The segment heap memory mechanism is regarded as a modern memory management mechanism provided by Microsoft. From Microsoft’s testing, the use of this mechanism helps to save software overhead on memory.

For example, Microsoft Edge based on Chromium can save up to 27% of memory resources and reduce power consumption when the segment heap memory mechanism is enabled. For this reason, Google Chrome also tested the mechanism in the Canary version.

Although the segment heap memory mechanism can indeed reduce the overhead of memory resources and reduce power consumption, it is obtained by using processor resources, so there is no reduction in power consumption.

After testing, the Google Chrome development team found that enabling this mechanism can indeed reduce memory overhead, but processor resource usage has increased significantly.

At the same time, the overall performance of the browser, especially WebXPRT3, Speedometer 2, and JetStream2, has a retrogressive performance and feels somewhat outweighed.

If the segment heap memory mechanism is used on a processor with lower performance, the long-term high load of CPU resources will cause the overall performance to decrease more significantly.

In response to the above problems, Microsoft engineers said that after the segment heap memory mechanism is enabled, whether it is memory resources or processor resource utilization will be affected to varying degrees.

In this case, the improvement of the memory resource utilization rate is accompanied by an increase in the CPU resource utilization rate. Microsoft engineers said that there are some solutions to optimize this problem.

1) Reduce the amount of transient heap allocations the browser makes. This will require significant changes across the entire browser codebase.
2) Improve the performance of the Segment heap itself. This can only be addressed by the Windows team and we are investigating our options.

Google engineers pointed out that if this solution is deployed, how to balance the utilization of memory and processing resources is a bit difficult, although it can indeed reduce memory usage.

For now, Chrome developer teams have no reason to enable the segment heap memory mechanism on Google Chrome unless Chrome can get more telemetry data to show improvement.

However, in the stable version of Google Chrome v85, this mechanism is definitely not needed, so in this version, Google has decided to disable the segment heap memory mechanism.

Via: techdows