Yikes! This is the first time I've encountered this error, and it freaked me out a bit. =:-[
Early this morning I encountered the dreaded "Out of memory" error dialog in my browser (Maxthon 2) when I tried to save one of my TiddlyWikis:
According to Process Explorer, I wasn't using much memory. That made sense: I was browing in four tabs (three of them local TWs) and not running any other apps, except maybe Notepad++.
When I dismissed the dialog, I got this dialog (which I'd never seen before):
This was a bit distressing but not especially concerning. I have my TWs set to autosave, so I simply grabbed the contents of the tiddler I'd been working on and threw them into a .TXT file. Then I attempted another save and got the usual ActiveX approval dialog:
... and then the "Are you sure you want to leave this page?" dialog (since I still hadn't saved that tiddler I'd been working on when the problem occurred):
I chose to leave the page, knowing I could paste in the tiddler content after getting over the save hurdle — and something unusual happen. My TW refreshed to an empty page. Completely empty -- blank, white. I glanced over at the folder containing my TW and immediately spotted the file size was "0 bytes." Sure enough, there wasn't a single character inside the TW -- no source code, not even a stray space. :_(
Thankfully, I back up my TWs to a network drive about once a day, so I didn't lose the entire file -- though I did lose a few hours' worth of work. (That hasn't happened to me in a while, and I have to admit: It stung!)
After that, I got curious and tried to save the other open TWs, which behaving similarly. I was able to bring over the back-up of my main TW from the network drive and successfull save a few changes in it (including re-enabling automatic back-ups!) -- but after several minutes, I got the same out of memory error and lost that copy of TW on attempting to save it.
After scouring the cache for a copy of my lost TW (to no avail), I closed the browser, dumped the cache, and restarted -- and haven't had any troubles since.
—
I'm curious what happened, though. Has anyone else encountered this behavior? It's my first time in nearly a year and a half of using TiddlyWiki every day.
I'd have thought my real-time changes were made in a temp copy of TW and then saved (over the existing TW in my directory) when I click on "Save Changes" or (in my case) click "done" in a tiddler and invoke the autosave. When I encountered the "failed to save" error, I expected TW had simply failed to save and that my last-saved version was still sitting safely in its folder. Instead, it looks like TW overwrote itself with an empty file.
Most importantly:
Any ideas on how to safeguard against this? As noted, I've re-enabled automatic back-ups and am using Tyler Akins's BackupOptionsPlugin (
http://rumkin.com/tools/tiddlywiki/#BackupOptionsPlugin) to limit the number of back-ups it's making.
If TW overwrote itself with an empty HTML file, would it not also similarly overwrite the back-ups?
Could my having multiple TWs open at the same time have contributed to the issue? It's not uncommon for me to have multiple TWs open at once (running similar sets of plugins), but it is a little unusual for me to have multiple tiddlers open in edit view at the same time across multiple TWs. (I think I had one tiddler each open in edit view in two of the three TWs when the problem occurred. I don't think any of them had the same tiddler name.)
It may have been a freak accident, but I'd love to hear from anyone with any insight. :)