Paywall Memory Usage on iOS

When inspecting memory usage in Instruments, you might notice your paywall appears to be using over, or around, 512MB of memory. That can seem concerning, but in almost all cases, it’s nothing to worry about.

Whenever a WKWebView is created, WebKit reserves a chunk of memory (typically 512MB) for virtual machine allocation. That memory is reserved by iOS, and most apps using WebKit on iOS will see similar readings during profiling within Instruments. In short, this is just how WKWebView is designed to work under the hood.

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Can I reduce this memory usage?

If your app creates a lot of paywalls or manages many WKWebView instances, you can reduce memory usage by turning off paywall preloading:

let options = SuperwallOptions()
options.paywalls.shouldPreload = false
                 
Superwall.configure(apiKey: "MY_API_KEY", options: options)

This prevents Superwall from creating webviews ahead of time, which reduces memory pressure. However, the tradeoff is that the paywall will take slightly longer to show and users will briefly see the loading view as the paywall is initialized on demand.

We recommend leaving preloading on unless you’re noticing real performance issues or memory warnings.