While trying to handle a bug that had a description like “if I do this, tracker-store’s memory grows to 80MB and my device starts swapping”, we where surprised to learn that a sqlite3_stmt consumes about 5 kb heap. Auwch.
Before we didn’t think that those prepared statements where very large, so we threw all of them in a hashtable for in case the query was ran again later. However, if you collect thousands of such statements, memory consumption obviously grows.
We decided to implement a LRU cache for these prepared statements. For clients that access the database using direct-access the cache will be smaller, so that max consumption is only a few megabytes. Because our INSERT and DELETE queries are more reusable than SELECT queries, we split it into two different caches per thread.
The implementation is done with a simple intrinsic linked ring list. We’re still testing it a little bit to get good cache-size numbers. I guess it’ll go in master soon. For your testing pleasure you can find the branch here.