I have a web application that loads names into a picklist and the question came up: how many names would be too much for the web page to handle? What about 5,000 names, for example?

Modern web browsers have a memory snapshot built in. Just press F12 and there it is. So I fired up my application with over 5,000 names loaded into an array and displayed in a scrolling div. 2.5 MB.

Then I visited Facebook. Logged in, the page reported over 78 MB.

Google’s clean-looking home page? Not logged in, 11.2 MB.

Twitter? Logged in, 83 MB.

This was enough for me to stop worrying about the memory impact of 5,000 names in my web application. With our casual acceptance of multi-MB web pages it is easy to forget that the complete works of Shakespeare in plain text is 5.5 MB and compresses to less than half of that.

Just because you can do something, does not mean you should. Smaller is better and faster, and software bloat of various kinds is responsible for many performance issues.

There are trade-offs though both in time and in performance. Maybe it is better to load just a few names, and retrieve more from the server when needed. It is easy to test such things. Nevertheless, I found it useful to get some perspective on the memory usage of modern web sites.