Device Memory

1. Introduction

1. Serving light version of the site or specific components, for low-end devices. Egs:

   • Serve Google "search lite" - a 10KB search results page used in EM.

   • Serve a light version of video player in Facebook.

   • Serve lightweight tile images in Google Maps.

2. Normalizing Metrics: analytics need to be able to normalize their metrics against the device-class. For instance, a 100ms long task on a high end device is a more severe issue compared to a low-end device.

Device memory is an especially useful signal for determining “device-class”. Low memory devices devices (under 512MB, 512MB - 1GB) are widely used in emerging markets.

1.1. Usage Example

Accept-CH: Device-Memory

In turn, on receiving the above preferences from the server, a compatible user agent would then advertise the device capability for memory, via the `Device-Memory` request header field:

GET /example HTTP/1.1
Device-Memory: 0.5
...

2. Device Memory (Client Hint) Header Field

The Device Memory header field is a [CLIENT-HINTS] header. It is a structured header value containing an item which value is a decimal that indicates the client’s device memory, i.e. the approximate amount of RAM in GiB. The ABNF (Augmented Backus-Naur Form) syntax for the `Device-Memory` header field is as follows:

Device-Memory = sf-decimal

2.1. Computing Device Memory Value

An upper bound and a lower bound should be set on the list of values.

NOTE: While implementations may choose different values, the recommended upper bound is 8GiB and the recommended lower bound is 0.25GiB (or 256MiB).

If Device-Memory header field occurs in a message more than once, the last value overrides all previous occurrences.

2.2. Examples

512 MiB will be reported as:

Device-Memory: 0.5

1000 MiB will be reported as:

Device-Memory: 1

A full list of possible values should be as follows: 0.25, 0.5, 1, 2, 4, 8

3. Device Memory JS API

[
    SecureContext,
    Exposed=(Window,Worker)
] interface mixin NavigatorDeviceMemory {
    readonly attribute double deviceMemory;
};

Navigator includes NavigatorDeviceMemory;
WorkerNavigator includes NavigatorDeviceMemory;

NOTE: self.navigator.deviceMemory Returns the amount of ram in GiB as described in § 2.1 Computing Device Memory Value

4. Security Considerations

Device identification and classification (e.g. device type and class) based on advertised User-Agent, and other characteristics of the client, are commonly used to select and provide optimized content. Such solutions frequently rely on commercial device databases, which are costly, hard to integrate, and hard to maintain. This specification defines a mechanism to obtain device memory capability that addresses these technical challenges.

To reduce fingerprinting risk, reported value is rounded to single most significant bit, as opposed to reporting the exact value. In addition, an upper and lower bound is placed on the reported values.

5. IANA considerations

5.1. Device-Memory Header field

Header field name

Device-Memory

Applicable protocol

http

Status

standard

Author/Change controller

IETF

Specification document

this specification (§ 2 Device Memory (Client Hint) Header Field)

6. Acknowledgements

Special thanks to all the contributors for their technical input and suggestions that led to improvements to this specification.