Each nsCSSStyleSheet has a pointer to a nsCSSStyleSheetInner. The
nsCSSStyleSheetInner is shared across multiple stylesheets, in
general. The nsCSSStyleSheetInner owns the rules and the child
stylesheets.
What this means is that a given rule object is effectively owned by
multiple sheets. However, cycles can only form through rule objects
that have been JS-wrapped, and if we're JS-wrapping a rule object that
means we have ensured that it's owned by only one stylesheet.
Therefore, we only traverse and unlink mInner if it's uniquely owned
by our sheet.
Similarly, if our child sheets or any of their rules have been
JS-wrapped, that means that we must have an mInner that we own
outright.
This patch enables sharing of an nsAttrValue's MiscContainer between nodes for style rules. MiscContainers of type eCSSStyleRule are now refcounted (with some clever struct packing to ensure that the amount of memory allocated for MiscContainer remains unchanged on 32 and 64 bit). This infrastructure can be used to share most MiscContainer types in the future if we find advantages to sharing other types than just eCSSStyleRuley. A cache mapping strings to MiscContainers has been added to nsHTMLCSSStyleSheet. MiscContainers can be shared between nsAttrValues when one nsAttrValue is SetTo another nsAttrValue or when there is a cache hit in this cache. This patch also adds the ability to tell a style rule that it belongs to an nsHTMLCSSStyleSheet, with appropriate accessor functions to separate that from the existing case of belonging to an nsCSSStyleSheet.
The primary use case is to reduce memory use for pages that have lots of inline style attributes with the same value. This can happen easily with large pages that are automatically generated. An (admittedly pathological) testcase in Bug 686975 sees over 250 MB of memory savings with this change. Reusing the same MiscContainer for multiple nodes saves the overhead of maintaining separate copies of the string containing the serialized value of the style attribute and of creating separate style rules for each node. Eliminating duplicate style rules enables further savings in layout through style context sharing. The testcase sees the amount of memory used by style contexts go from over 250 MB to 10 KB.
Because the cache is based on the text value of the style attribute, it will not handle attributes that have different text values but are parsed into identical style rules. We also do not attempt to share MiscContainers when the node's base URI differs from the document URI. The effect of these limitations is expected to be low.
Trevor Saunders
Benoit Jacob
Boris Zbarsky
Kyle Huey
Isaac Aggrey
Ehsan Akhgari
Aryeh Gregor
Olli Pettay
Gervase Markham
Zack Weinberg
Nicholas Nethercote
Michael Wu
Masayuki Nakano
Craig Topper
L. David Baron