Mobile Web Test Suites Working Group Blog

A few months ago, we looked at how well existing performance test suites worked on mobile browsers: they generally worked poorly (if at all), and in many occasions, the limiting factor was the memory required to run these tests.

As a follow-up, we have developed a simple test (source code) that allows to determine the maximum amount of memory a browser can dispose of.

The test is interactive and with every successful pass, it prompts the user to increase the size of data put in memory until an upper limit of 100 MB JSON's . If the browser fails to fetch a given amount of data, the user can pick a lower target.

Depending on how the device is managing out-of-memory errors, it may be more or less difficult to find that upper limit, but overall, it should help get a fairly good idea of the memory limitations of a given browser/device pair.

The Mobile Test working group welcome your comments. Any comments and/or suggestions can be sent to public mailing list or on this blog.