Opera Mobile, offline web app development, and memory

Opera Mobile, offline web app development, and memory

I'm developing a data collection app for use on a HP iPAQ 211. I'm doing it as an offline web app using Opera Mobile 9.7 and Google Gears. Being it is an offline app, it is very dependent on Javascript for much of its behavior. I'm using the LocalServer, Database, and Geolocation components of Gears, as well as the JQuery core and a couple of plugins for form validation and other usability tweaks. I've tried to be conservative with my programming style and free up or close resources whenever possible, but Opera just slowly dies after about 10-20 minutes of use. The Javascript engine stops responding, pages only half-load, and eventually stop loading completely.

Quitting and relaunching the browser solves the problem, but only temporarily. The iPAQ ships with 128 MB of RAM, about 85-87 MB of which is available immediately after a reset. With only Opera running, there still remains about 50 MB that is left unused.

My questions are thus:

1. Is it possible to get Opera to address this unused RAM?
2. Are there configuration settings in Opera or in the Windows Registry itself that will help improve performance?
3. Are my plans too ambitious, given the platform I have to work with? I know that Gears and Windows Mobile 6 are on their way out, but they (theoretically) suffice for what I need to do. I could ditch them in favor of an iPhone/iPod Touch and Mobile Safari, but I'd like to try to make this work first.

That this motley collection of technologies works at all is a minor miracle, but it needs to be faster and more stable. I appreciate any suggestions.

I am not very familiar with WinMo memory management but AFAIK any single process only has 32 MB of address space. It is possible to use more memory but the techniques are tricky and I don't think Opera uses these. So it doesn't matter if you have 80 or 40 MB free, Opera will use up to 32.