Modern web browsers manage millions of dynamic objects across tabs, frames, DOM elements, and JavaScript contexts. However, fine-grained behaviors related to object allocation, lifetime, and memory usage in production browsers remain elusive. Chromium's modular and extensible design, use of specialized memory allocators, and sensitivity to instrumentation overhead further complicate precise object tracking. To this end, we develop a lightweight, thread-safe, and non-intrusive profiling framework. Using this infrastructure, we present an empirical characterization of Chromium's memory object behavior across twelve diverse, user-centric workloads. We examine object lifetime events, size diversity, spatial locality, type diversity, and memory activity, and reflect on their broader software and architectural implications. Our study offers a systems-oriented view into Chromium's architecture and memory behavior, and highlights structural challenges in efficient memory management in large-scale and diverse systems.
Upadhyay et al. (Thu,) studied this question.