"Out of memory" issues - where do I begin?

ember1205 · Sep 22, 2020, 1:01 PM

I have confirmed that only Electron crashes on the Pi itself. The MM server does not experience any hiccups and remote browser connections remain functional.

I at least now understand WHAT is crashing. Next steps might be to figure out WHY it’s crashing and potentially remedy it.

sdetweil · Sep 22, 2020, 1:04 PM

@ember1205 note that we are trailing release of electron quite significantly (we are on 6.1.7 and latest is 9.x.x) … you might try moving up to a different version, no guaranty that MM will run tho… or what the other impacts are…

as i said back a few, with a minor startup change, you can get chromium to be the viewer on the pi.

ember1205 · Sep 22, 2020, 1:13 PM

I’ve made the change to Chromium - we’ll see how that does going forward.

I do recall reading plenty about the severe lag of Electron in terms of the version that’s part of MM, so that part wasn’t “news” really. What I genuinely don’t understand is why this specific, basic configuration continues to have issues for me while Electron mostly does what it needs to do for so many others without creating this sort of problem.

sdetweil · Sep 22, 2020, 1:24 PM

@ember1205 electron is a ‘single’ threaded app… but events happen that cause it to need to act like mutltiple threads.
there are lots of edge cases where the timing is problematic…

its not out of memory, its lost its way…

i wrote a plugin/module to display pics matches with cal entries, floating above the mirror screen… (pong like moving boxes)
electron does NOT like two windows being manipulated at the same time… took a long time to find that, always an out of memory error or hang… but not

ember1205 · Sep 22, 2020, 1:55 PM

Good info.

I’m interested to see how for the MM will make it now using Chromium instead of Electron. Since I have two with the same setup, I’ll set both to use Chromium for an additional level of testing it out.

Why was Electron chosen as the browser up to this point? And, what potential downsides are there to Chromium?

sdetweil · Sep 22, 2020, 1:56 PM

@ember1205 >Why was Electron chosen as the browser up to this point? And, what potential downsides are there to Chromium?

i don’t know and i don’t know… was way before my time.

ember1205 · Sep 22, 2020, 6:08 PM

Welp…

No change. System still crashes on the Pi using Chromium.

In looking at the most recent core file, it’s still showing that electron is what’s faulting.

There are no running processes of chromium and electron is still being started. Something is amiss with the configuration to where your run-start.sh script is either not being called or is not launching the correct browser for some reason.

I’ve made no changes to run-start.sh, I’ve edited package.json so that this line is gone:

"start": "DISPLAY=\"${DISPLAY:=:0}\" ./node_modules/.bin/electron js/electron.js",

And has been replaced with this one:

"start": "./run-start.sh",

config/config.js has the following setting:

var config = {
	address: "0.0.0.0", 	// Address to listen on, can be:
							// - "localhost", "127.0.0.1", "::1" to listen on loopback interfac
e
							// - another specific IPv4/6 to listen on a specific interface
							// - "0.0.0.0", "::" to listen on any interface
							// Default, when address config is left out or empty, is "localhost
"
	port: 8080,
	basePath: "/", 	// The URL path where MagicMirror is hosted. If you are using a Reverse proxy
					// you must set the sub path here. basePath must end with a /
	ipWhitelist: ["127.0.0.1", "192.168.192.0/24", "::1"], 	// Set [] to allow all IP addresses
															// 
or add a specific IPv4 of 192.168.1.5 :
															// 
["127.0.0.1", "::ffff:127.0.0.1", "::1", "::ffff:192.168.1.5"],
															// 
or IPv4 range of 192.168.3.0 --> 192.168.3.15 use CIDR format :
															// 
["127.0.0.1", "::ffff:127.0.0.1", "::1", "::ffff:192.168.3.0/28"],

	useHttps: false, 		// Support HTTPS or not, default "false" will use HTTP
	httpsPrivateKey: "", 	// HTTPS private key path, only require when useHttps is true
	httpsCertificate: "", 	// HTTPS Certificate path, only require when useHttps is true

	language: "en",
	logLevel: ["INFO", "LOG", "WARN", "ERROR"],
	timeFormat: 24,
	units: "metric",
	// serverOnly:  true/false/"local" ,
	serverOnly:"local",

ember1205 · Sep 22, 2020, 6:16 PM

One tweak to the run-start.sh script seems to have fixed it. I changed this line:

serveronly=$(grep -v '^[[:blank:]]*//'  config/config.js | grep -i serveronly: | awk '{print tolower($2)}' | tr -d ,\"\'\\r)

To this:

serveronly=$(grep -v '^[[:blank:]]*//'  config/config.js | grep -i serveronly: | awk '{print tolower($1)}' | tr -d ,\"\'\\r)

The awk command seems to have been looking for a variable that wasn’t being passed and by changing the variable number that it was looking for, it no longer starts electron and now starts chromium.

sdetweil · Sep 22, 2020, 6:20 PM

@ember1205 hm… do this

cd ~/MagicMirror
./run-start.sh

you should see something like this

 ./run-start.sh 
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.584] [LOG] Starting MagicMirror: v2.13.0-develop
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.588] [LOG] Loading config ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.590] [LOG] Loading module helpers ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.590] [LOG] No helper found for module: alert.
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.602] [LOG] Initializing new module helper ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.602] [LOG] Module helper loaded: updatenotification
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.603] [LOG] No helper found for module: clock.
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.840] [LOG] Initializing new module helper ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.840] [LOG] Module helper loaded: calendar
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.841] [LOG] No helper found for module: compliments.
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.841] [LOG] No helper found for module: currentweather.
[2020-09-22 13:13:51.841] [LOG] No helper found for module: weatherforecast.
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.147] [LOG] Initializing new module helper ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.147] [LOG] Check MagicMirror version for node helper 'MMM-Ring' - Minimum version: 2.11.0 - Current version: 2.13.0-develop
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.147] [LOG] Version is ok!
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.148] [LOG] Module helper loaded: MMM-Ring
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.148] [LOG] All module helpers loaded.
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.186] [LOG] Starting server on port 8090 ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.187] [INFO] You're using a full whitelist configuration to allow for all IPs
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.190] [LOG] Server started ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.190] [LOG] Connecting socket for: updatenotification
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.190] [LOG] Connecting socket for: calendar
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.190] [LOG] Starting node helper for: calendar
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.191] [LOG] Connecting socket for: MMM-Ring
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.196] [LOG] MMM-Ring at (9/22/2020, 1:13:52 PM): Starting module: MMM-Ring
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.196] [LOG] Sockets connected & modules started ...
[2020-09-22 13:13:52.196] [LOG]
Ready to go! Please point your browser to: http://0.0.0.0:8090
Starting chromium browser now, have patience, it takes a minute

that last line is the key to running in split mode, server with chromium over the top…

to run it multiple times, you will have to kill the server process

 ps -ef | grep server

sam 3267 3266 1 13:13 pts/0 00:00:01 node serveronly

kill -9 3267

thx for the hint, the space after the serverOnly:

sdetweil · Sep 22, 2020, 6:25 PM

@ember1205 I just updated the script to handle with/without the space…