GWT app kills Chrome & Opera on Windows when idle

[Miloš Ranđelović]

Hi all,

I am working on a fairly complex GWT app, the primary target browser being an SQLite powered one (with Chrome being the recommended one). 

When the application is running idle in the browser, after an undefined period of time (usually after 1-2 hours) the browser tab in Chrome crashes (showing the "Aw, snap"). This happens in Opera as well, but not Safari (although Safari on Windows is discontinued anyway). And also to be noted - this only happens in Windows, on the Mac OS X the app can run for as long as necessary.

I know Chrome had some issues with the GPU drivers under Windows, so I have tried many different options in Chrome - turning off sandbox, reduced GPU sandbox, no GPU, even ran it in safe mode with networking, but nothing seems to help - the app would inevitably crash.

First I thought it was a browser issue, but after seeing the crash in Opera as well (plus, all other websites seem to work normally), I eliminated that possibility and am fairly confident that something inside GWT triggers it.

I have enabled logging and crash reporting in Chrome, installed Sawbuck, and went through heaps of log messages, but cannot find a pattern. After the app goes idle, only the Chrome updater and SafeBrowsingCheck messages (tried to turn that off as well) are showing up, with nothing coming out just before the crash.

I do not have any Scheduler activities in the background.

The only thing I can think of is that we moved to GWT 2.5.1 recently (from 2.5.0), so we are going to revert back and deploy to another test server to see how it goes, but I would not hold on to that as a long term solution even if it "solves" our problems.

This is a deal breaker for the app and any help or guidance would be highly appreciated.

[Miloš Ranđelović]

Just to note, Firefox or IE are out of the question as the app depends on the in-browser SQLite database to function.

I've also tried Chromium, but the same thing happens.

[Miloš Ranđelović]

Unfortunately, I cannot edit the subject, but it has gone wild on OS X as well, so the issue is not limited to Windows only. Will try and do some testing on Linux.

Anyway, after closely monitoring the system - when you leave the app running idle, after some period of time the CPU goes 100%, and RAM usage increases... ultimately causing it to crash, probably when it hits the limit. After that, CPU and RAM usage return to normal.

Once again, the app is idle, we've monitored the network and no server requests were made.

[Jens]

First I would check if its really no JavaScript/GWT code that goes wild after a while. I think I would just start CPU profiling using Dev Tools and keep an eye on it until CPU usage increases.

Other than that you probably have more luck solving it by asking the Chrome guys. Btw its not surprising that it also happens in Opera because since Opera 15 the browser is based on Chrome's Blink + V8 engines. Try older versions of Chrome also. Maybe there is a version that does not have this problem.

-- J.

[Miloš Ranđelović]

Hi Jens, thank you for your reply.

I did not know Opera started using V8, things make more sense now! Anyway, as an act of desperation we have started compiling older revisions of the code and testing them to see if they show the same behaviour. And we found one which works normal! So now we are going revision by revision and doing witch hunting, to try and isolate the malicious piece of code.

Once we have that figured out, I will file an issue on the right tracker, given it is not a human error. Will post an update once we track it down.

[Miloš Ranđelović]

So, there in fact was a Scheduler on a popup not stopping after the popup closes. It's funny though, as the popup is only opened once during startup, and that's it. But that was causing somehow the issue in Chrome, Safari handled it well.

Anyway, we've resolved that, and everything is working normal again.

[nsarvesh]

Hi,

We are facing the same issue. When the Chrome is Idle. Also we have a drag and drop feature. However when we drag and drop it we see the CPU Usage and Memory Usage are very high.

We are using the below tech stack GWT with GXT and Oracle db.

Any pointers to improve this will be thankful.

Thanks,

Sarvesh. N