Hacking Browser memory

[Bri]

I have two questions, and was unable to find the answer by searching.

First, how much memory does the memory expansion pak that comes with the Opera browser have?

Second, if you use a GBA memory expansion cart (like the EZ 3in1 or eWin 2in1) that has more memory than the one that comes with the Opera browser, does the Opera browser take advantage of the extra memory?

Thanks!

-Bri

 

[noONE]

The Opera Memory pack has only 8MB(maybe 10MB, heard different "opinions" about it,but 10MB would seem a bit.. odd) of RAM.
even tho the unofficial rampacks (like 3in1, and Ewin 2in1 etc) has more ram, the Opera Browser only takes advantage of 8MB.

 

[Minox]

Above=true

 

[Bri]

Wikipedia lists it as 10MB, and other sources have listed it as 4MB. I wonder if it's possible to hack the browser to take advantage of extra memory.

-Bri

 

[Minox]

Wikipedia lists it as 10MB, and other sources have listed it as 4MB. I wonder if it's possible to hack the browser to take advantage of extra memory.

-Bri

That could probably be done. Although I don't see the point in that, the DS browser is pretty useless anyway.

 

[arctic_flame]

It's 8MB. Homebrew libs that can use it show this.

 

[noONE]

Well, 4MB is certainly wrong, it would maybe be "hackable" to get more, when having more RAM, but what would be even more neet would be to hack it to be faster >_> like.. be able to optimize it, as the Opera team should've done a bit more.

 

[Bri]

Is Opera that much slower in text-only mode than other text-only browsers? I thought the speed was due to the slow WiFi connection, in particular downloading large images. How much optimization could they do?

Another interesting optimization might be to cache to the microSD card so that it would be persistent. That might speed things up considerably when revisiting websites from one session to another.

-Bri

 

[pepsibluehawk87]

That would be nice. The DS browser is ok, but would be great if somebody actually implemented these ideas.

 

[DanTheManMS]

The wifi speed does slow things down to a certain extent, but I think the major bottleneck is the DS's slow CPU speed. That's what causes even text-only pages to take a relatively long time to load, and what causes image-intensive pages to take forever even after all the images have been downloaded.

Overclocked DS systems have been known to run the Opera browser faster, which helps confirm my theory.

And again I'll state that the official RAM pack is 8 MB. Or do you trust Wikipedia more than the creator of DLDI?

 

[Bri]

It sounds like a consensus (at least in this thread) that the official browser RAM pak is 8MB. I've never actually said that it wasn't, only that there seemed to be varying opinions on the matter (which is why I asked in the first place). Someone should change it on Wikipedia.

When I use the browser, it is usually stuck downloading (particularly on image-intensive pages) if the info displayed at the top is to be believed. I haven't noticed it taking a long time to render a page after the page is done downloading though, which would seem to imply that the bottleneck is the WiFi rather than the CPU speed. If so, increasing the RAM and even allowing it to use the microSD for persistent cache might speed things up if you visit the same sites often. But if the bottleneck is the CPU as DanTheManMS thinks, it sounds like there's not a lot that can be done without access to source code.

It seems like the easiest thing to hack would be the upper limit on the RAM if more RAM is available. But since nobody has done that, perhaps it's not easy to do or else the thought is that it won't help much.

-Bri

 

[DanTheManMS]

I still think it's mostly the CPU speed. It tries to multitask and download images while formatting the page correctly at the same time, which slows everything down, making it seem like the images are taking forever to download. I'll admit the wifi speed is a legitimate factor, but I still think the CPU is the main bottleneck.

As a test, I turned on overview mode and turned images off before going to the GBAtemp homepage. I let it load fully, then enabled images. The first 20 or so images were downloaded very quickly, and then it slowed down while it started rendering some of the images that were visible on screen. Once these finished rendering, the download rate picked up and the rest of the images downloaded relatively quickly (~90 images total).

I also just Googled for some DS overclocks and saw this comment about an overclock mod that apparently has "fast" and "ultra" modes for the overclocking:

I tried running the Opera browser (standard configuration, no M3 or anything) and it worked fine in FAST mode. Loading pages/images did speed up. It didn't like ULTRA mode so much. There were screen glitches and the connection dropped sometimes.

The bottom line is you can make Opera run faster.

Also from the Division 6 forums, which makes the GBAccelerator DS:
QUOTEYep.

DS Browser:
.66x OK
1.4x OK
1.8x Worked, but not reliably. Would get screen glitches and dropped connections after a while.

You can speed up Opera, just not all the way to 1.8x.

EDIT: of course those comments look so similar that they're probably the same person, but oh well.