Howler crashes Chrome when playing many sounds with buffer:true

[kommen]

There is an issue in Chrome, where many audio tags crash the Chrome renderer process (https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=156331 , it is marked as fixed, but the crashes still happens, see my comment there).

To reproduce the crash in a somewhat realistic use case:

  setInterval(function() {
    new Howl({ urls: ["http://assets.sauspiel.de/sounds/effects/applaus-61-90Punkte-1.mp3"], buffer:true }).volume(1).play()
  }, 1000);

In Mac OS X's Activity Monitor you can follow the Thread count of the Chrome renderer process going up and never down. At about 400 threads the renderer crashes (without leaving crash reports, of course) after playing about 200 sounds.

In contrast if one uses HTML5 Audio without Howler, e.g.

  setInterval(function() {
    var audio = new Audio("http://assets.sauspiel.de/sounds/effects/applaus-61-90Punkte-1.mp3");
    audio.play();
  }, 1000);

The process' thread count still goes up continually, but get's down again when a garbage collect is triggered (as can be seen in the Web Inspector Timeline), making a crash less likely at least.

[kommen]

This issue seems to document the Chrome behaviour I'm seeing and seems to be worked on: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=71322

[PaulMorris]

Maybe your actual use case doesn't match your example code, but does it still occur if you do it like this?

var sound = new Howl({ urls: ["http://assets.sauspiel.de/sounds/effects/applaus-61-90Punkte-1.mp3"], buffer:true });
setInterval(function() {
    sound.volume(1).play();
  }, 1000);

[kommen]

Thanks for our response Paul!

Yeah, my actual use case is different, as we're having many dozens different sounds which can be played over the course of a game within a few minutes. I also have a more complex testcase with many sounds, which is closer to our actual use case than my example, if you're interested.

Anyway, the example as you posted it, doesn't make Chrome crash.

[goldfire]

So you have 400 different sounds? This sound like the perfect use-case for a sound sprite.

[mk]

@goldfire We have more than 1000 very short sounds (~50mb in total). And we play random variants of each sound. We don't want to load all 50mb into a sound sprite because if you only play for a few minutes, you'll only need a few dozen sounds.

[goldfire]

Have you tried forcing the old Howl objects to be garbage collected? Howler keeps them in memory so that they can be played again quickly without having to reload the file (the caching system). However, since you have an unusual use-case, you could store a reference to each new Howl that you create, and then destroy it when you are done with it so that its Audio object gets garbage collected.