Devhelp uses lot of memory for what it actually does

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I frequently face this issue where, if I open API documentation in few tabs in "Devhelp", the memory usage shoots up considerably. All this just for rendering simple markup pages. I guess this is due to the "WebKit-Gtk" backend which it uses to render the webpages.

Is there any way to reduce the memory footprint of "Devhelp" ?

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“What it actually does” is rendering HTML, in the same way your browser renders HTML. There’s CSS, JavaScript, and a document model. So: no, short of not rendering HTML, there’s not much DevHelp can do.

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Well, WebKit uses a huge amount of memory compared to, say, Chromium or Firefox. In theory, Devhelp could switch to using one of those. But that would be a huge amount of work and is extremely unlikely.

I think @chergert has actually been working on getting rid of the HTML altogether? Is that true?

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No. Christian is working on a simpler implementation than the current libdevhelp/devhelp one.

There’s no point in dropping HTML support when all the API references generated by GNOME projects are HTML pages.