I am looking for information such as:
Is there a set max memory for a browser or the parser?
There is no practical limit per se for the browsers you've mentioned,
though depending on how your code is written, and the age of the
client machine, things could well indeed become unusable.
Is there a way to test to see if how much utilization is done?
Does memory depend on the browser computer as opposed to some set limit?
I would say don't worry about this level of detail at this stage. In
Firefox at least you can type about:memory in the address bar to get a
generic overview of memory use.
We are looking at a browser holding about .15mb data text,
I assume you meant 15 MB and not 150kb.
and a single page size of around 20,000 lines of html and javascript.
There are about 20 forms in the page and an ajax update of the server is
done
every time the user leaves one form and goes to the next.
Why would you need 15MB of data on every page to fill out a small
number of forms? Since you'll already have a back and forth channel to
the server, could you not load the relevant data on demand?
This data can be stored on the client outside of RAM if necessary, but
I'm curious to what the necessity is to have it all available at once
anyway instead of loading bit s of it at a time as the relevant forms
are needed.
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Actually, the size of the data is .15mb or 150kb. What we are doing is
necessary or else we would need to hold most of the data in session on the
server and do a lot of manipulation and page refreshes. The data is required
accross the set of forms for what we are doing and it and the forms are
dynamic. So we may have a location section, dynamically add/delete more
locations, which will cause sections on other forms to automatically change.
The html code actually will change along with the data.
A competitors normal business case scenario can take upwards of one hour to
fill over the web using single form pages and caching data on the server. We
are seeing times of around 30 minutes or less and the users really like it
which means they are much more likely to use it.