Subsequent to some performance issues with a few Backbone apps, I spent some time digging further into Google Chrome’s timeline panel, and specifically the memory view that shows allocated memory, and breaks down the number of DOM nodes held in memory.

Some tests/demos along with provisional findings are provided here: chrome timeline exploration. The official documentation for Chrome’s dev tools is getting better, but could still use improvement. Hopefully this will go some way to providing a bit more insight into what’s going on, what different numbers mean, and what sort of behaviour you can expect from common scenarios.

As I’m nowhere near an expert of Chrome’s internals nor on memory profiling in general, any suggestions or corrections are more than welcome (pull requests or whatever).