Chrome will no longer use Windows Segment Heap going forward. Google has decided to end the experiment as Microsoft informed it won’t offer control over the heap type. Chrome is switching to PartitionAlloc for Chrome as the company felt it” seems to offers the desired memory savings “.
Google has noticed significant memory gains with Windows Segment Heap, but it also found that it comes at the cost of performance.
The company disabled the feature in Chrome 85 and continue to experiment.
Chrome will no longer use Windows Segment Heap
Google’s Bruce Dawson closed the performance regression with Window Segment heap as Fixed by citing
” I filed an issue on GitHub asking for finer control of heap type. Microsoft replied saying that they are continuing to work on improving the Segment heap, they hope to mitigate all apps segment heap eventually, the difference between the old and new heaps may not stay consistent over time, so they don’t want to offer control over heap types
https://github.com/microsoft/WinDev/issues/39#issuecomment-729313323″.
While confirming this Bruce revealed, Chrome will use PartitionAlloc by default.
“In lieu of that and of change of Chrome to use PartitionAlloc by default (crrev.com/c/2543884,available in today canary) this bug seems no longer relevant so I will close this as fixed (by virtue of no longer using the Segment Heap). ”
In another bug that requests for Segment Heap needed, Bruce closed it as Wontfix and said ”
Microsoft has said that we will not get flags to control the type of heap created and Chrome is switching to PartitionAlloc anyway (crrev.com/c/2543884). Given that PartitionAlloc seems to offer the desired memory savings I can happily close this as WontFix.”
What is PartitiionAlloc
PartitionAlloc is a memory allocator optimized for performance and security in Blink. All objects in Blink are expected to be allocated with PartitiionAlloc or Oilpan (but not yet done)
You can know more about it on its design document here.
What do you say on Google ditching Segment Heap? Let us know in the comments below.
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