Flex And IE Out Of Memory Error

Posted by Brad Wood

Sep 26, 2008 11:56:00 UTC

So in the past 3 days I have been trying Flex I've had several out of memory errors that crashed my browser. I don't know if it is my operating system, my browser, Flash in general, or Flex, but it sucks. For the record I am using Windows XP Pro, IE 7, Flash 9, and Flex 3. This is what happens: As I develop, I keep hitting save in Flex Builder, waiting for it to recompile in the background, then Alt-tabbing over to IE and whacking F5 to refresh. Well, over the course of 2 or 3 hours of doing this, the memory usage for iexpolore.exe just keeps climbing and climbing as though there is a memory leak or garbage collection isn't happening.Finally once IE gets close to about 600 to 700 Megs of Ram I hit refresh, and WHAM! First, Flash pops a cute little error box with a stack trace that informs me "Error Code 1000: The system is out of memory." This page on Adobe's site says, "Flash Player needs more memory to compile your code than your system has available. Close some of the applications or processes running on your system." I don't by that. My machine has 3 Gigs of RAM, and up to 1.5 Gigs will still be free when this happens. I don't think closing any applications or processes is going to fix it. The error consistently happens around 700 Megs, so I think there is some internal limit in IE or something. Once I close the Flash error pop up, the entire IE process (including all the other tabs I had open) crashes hard with the little "Do you want to send Microsoft your bank routing numbers?" pop up that I always click "don't send" on. Today I am using Firefox. We'll see how that works for a change. Take that Microsoft.

Tags: ActionScript, Flash, Flex, Performance

8 Comments

radekg
Sep 26, 2008 17:35:42 UTC

So you think if you're not sending error reports to MS you're doing "bad" to MS?

radekg
Sep 26, 2008 17:38:20 UTC

Just one more thing: http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/ASC-2647

parkash
Nov 23, 2008 09:13:51 UTC

I am facing the same problem but my is running fine on FF :) But my client requirement is IE:(

Brad Wood
Nov 23, 2008 09:35:51 UTC

@parkash: That sucks, man. I have noticed that FF is MUCH better at cleaning up memory. Especially when I am refreshing my Flex app a lot.

flexit
Sep 04, 2009 16:56:13 UTC

Brad,

I've running into the same issue. Unfortanutely, I am yet to find a work around/solution. I believe you are correct in asserting the the problem is not solely memory related. Anyhow, here is an exception I am getting: Error: Error #1000: The system is out of memory.

   at global$init()
   at flash.display::MovieClip/nextFrame()
   at mx.managers::SystemManager/deferredNextFrame()
   at mx.managers::SystemManager/preloader_initProgressHandler()
   at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEventFunction()
   at flash.events::EventDispatcher/dispatchEvent()
   at mx.preloaders:: reloader/timerHandler()
   at flash.utils::Timer/_timerDispatch()
   at flash.utils::Timer/tick()

If you had made any progress with resolving this issue, please, post. Also, is it possible for you to share the source code of the app that causes this to happen?

Thanks in advance.

Brad Wood
Sep 05, 2009 07:06:54 UTC

@flexit: I never did find a solution for IE's rampant memory usage when refreshing my Flex app a lot. I eventually started working in FF. Unfortunately, I haven't worked on that Flex project for a while.

The app was pretty basic-- just a bunch of panels and charts with a few web service calls on load to retrieve data.

flex
Apr 09, 2010 17:47:56 UTC

Hi We are also facing this issue. Please suggest us, we debug and found that in our app we are loaidng modules in tabs, and after 5-6 operatons it gives us that out of memory issue. Please guide us.

flexit
Apr 09, 2010 20:50:01 UTC

It is a flash player issue. Adobe is aware of it and even has a solution, but I don't think the solution has been incorporated in any of the latest releases. Basically if the flash player memory consumption reaches somewhere around 600mb it crashes, and often takes the browser along with it. Safari on Mac seems to just close the 'crashed' window quietly, Chormium browser on linux shows a sad plugin face informing the user that the plug in has crashed without crashing the browser. In all other situations we saw browser either crashing or become unusable.

Flex And IE Out Of Memory Error