After adding "pointIntervalUnit" to column chart, highcharts crashes tab with out of memory exception.

[AntanasBarauskas]

Expected behaviour

After adding pointIntervalUnit property to plotOptions.series, browser tab results in out of memory exception. This behavior occurs in Chrome/FF/IE. Added jsFiddle example with crashing code.

Actual behaviour

Crashes with out of memory exception.
NOTE: Changing "type":"datetime" results in freezing tab instead of out of memory exception.

Live demo with steps to reproduce

http://jsfiddle.net/720aboww/

Affected browser(s)

Chrome/FF/IE

[pawelfus]

Hi @AntanasBarauskas

Thank you for this report. Could you post also a demo which doesn't crash the browser? It's a bit hard to debug.. :)

Thanks!

[AntanasBarauskas]

Hello @pawelfus

Sure: https://jsfiddle.net/06b4kvge/ :)

[pawelfus]

Thanks!

The problem is setting xAxis.categories. That means Highcharts will try to render every category (tickInterval = 1unit, for a datetime axis unit is 1ms) for a given range. So, if you set pointerInveralUnit to one year, it means ~365 * 24 * 360 * 1000 * number_of_points categories on xAxis.. :)

After removing xAxis.categories, it works fine: https://jsfiddle.net/06b4kvge/2/

[AntanasBarauskas]

You're right, removed xAxis.categories and works like a charm!

Thanks.

[inoyakaigor]

@pawelfus Hi!
Yesterday I've got an out of memory error. I had wrong config (with xAxis.categories) and in this line browser throw exception.

highcharts/js/parts/Time.js

Line 745 in b9c6835

tickPositions.push(t);

It was happen because, I believe, in tickPositions array had been containing ≈9 500 000 000 time numbers (difference between 01.05.2017 and 01.09.2018 in milliseconds). Of course it is my mistake but if Highcharts notified me about potentially memory leak I'd save a lot of time.

Therefore I suggest to add warning in this line about big length of tickPositions array. As sample if length more than 10 000 000

[pawelfus]

Hi @inoyakaigor

Thanks you for the suggestion! We used to throw Highcharts Error 19 in v4.0.x (link: https://www.highcharts.com/errors/19). I'm not sure about the story behind removing this, probably users preferred removing additional ticks instead of the error.

@TorsteinHonsi
bisect leads to db6981e#diff-ca66923e4c3df841c40471c133bce754 (search for factor19) - anything to add here?

[TorsteinHonsi]

anything to add here?

Yes, I thought error 19 was no longer necessary after this refactoring. By default, categories will be decimated: http://jsfiddle.net/highcharts/arxqgy5e/.

I'll look into the issue.

[TorsteinHonsi]

I'm not able to reproduce it from the description - can you make changes to http://jsfiddle.net/highcharts/arxqgy5e/5/ in order to showcase the issue?

[pawelfus]

@inoyakaigor - could you update the demo posted by Torstein?

[inoyakaigor]

@pawelfus yeah I will try but later

[pawelfus]

Can be related to #8026

[inoyakaigor]

http://jsfiddle.net/d9gu1eoj/5/ @pawelfus @TorsteinHonsi

Chrome silent disconnect a devtools. Firefox write in console out of memory error
Mistake in xAxis.labels.step = 1

[pawelfus]

Thank you @inoyakaigor for the demo!

Simplified demo: http://jsfiddle.net/BlackLabel/twf2kqr9/ (or based on Torstein's demo: http://jsfiddle.net/BlackLabel/arxqgy5e/14/ )
Actually, removing type: "datetime" does not resolve the issue: http://jsfiddle.net/BlackLabel/twf2kqr9/2/

@TorsteinHonsi - how should we resolve this? Prevent categories to display when datetime type is set? But this is misconfigured on a label's level.

[TorsteinHonsi]

It also fails when the type is not datetime, except it doesn't crash immediately. Maybe we need to reintroduce error 19 for cases when label.step is set?

[pawelfus]

I think solution suggested by @inoyakaigor is super easy: simply when we have more than X ticks, show warning/error ?

[inoyakaigor]

I think a warning should be shown if the number of ticks is greater than the width of the graph in pixels.

[TorsteinHonsi]

Done. I re-introduced the old logic that fires when the potential tick-interval is more than makes sense, but unlike before, added a more graceful degradation. The axis now render two ticks (min and max) instead of crashing the whole chart, and print a warning in the console. http://jsfiddle.net/highcharts/twf2kqr9/12/