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Question

Flash Player crashes in IE 11 when Flex alert dialogs are thrown

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
August 11, 2017
4 replies
1324 views

Having similar issue but with our own flash app with 1703 Windows 10, IE11 and player version 26.0.0.151.
We use Apache Flex to create our application and sometimes (not always) when a alert dialog is opened it crashes the flash player totaly leaving only a exclamation mark in the browser window.

I have tried many things to get it to work again but since it crashes completely silent (not even debug player with attached debugger shows anything) so i am out of ideas what to try to get it to work.

Hardware acceleration on or off does no difference and we get the same error on various computers.

This topic has been closed for replies.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

The fact that your workaround solves the memory issue informs my theory that generating that blur might be inefficient. Using a big uncompressable background should bear that out.

As you pointed out, it's also quite possible that there's an interaction with another Flex component that causes many instances of intermediary bitmaps to be generated. I actually like that theory a little bit better to be honest. Flex has some quirky behaviors around scaling when rounding errors are in play on high-resolution displays, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some component hitting a pathological case where it just keeps redrawing itself as that alert background gets generated.

We're really just guessing without stepping through the running application under a C++ debugger, but my sense, given that the difference in outcome is what Flex components are visible in the background, is that it's an issue in the Flex framework, and not in Flash Player itself.

It's also quite possible that if you mentioned it to the Apache Flex maintainers, that they're aware and could suggest other workarounds, if this one is inadequate for you.

JasbeerSingh

Adobe Employee

Hi

I tried reproducing your issue using the example from the below link:

Alert - Adobe ActionScript® 3 (AS3 Flex) API Reference

Each time an alert appears, there is a slight memory bump, expectedly due to the bitmap used for the grey background(which also goes away as we close the alert). But the memory spike I observed was always close to 10-15MB which is nowhere close to your observation.

It would be helpfull if you could log a Tracker bug along with a sample application and observations using the latest flash player and AIR.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

JasbeerSingh - I think you'd see a more interesting delta if you used a large, hard to compress background (say, 3840 × 2160 of 10pt lorem ipsum, or black and white "snow") and threw the alert over the top. Also, note that they're using one of the more recent Apache Flex SDKs. It would be interesting to know whether or not there's a difference in behavior between the last official Adobe Flex release, and the current Apache Flex SDK. That said, this may be a fact of life, where the answer is simply to optimize the behavior by using a compressible background like a solid color, to minimize the overhead of that alert control (or write a custom alert that isn't transparent). If there's a large delta in usage introduced in Apache Flex, we should probably file a bug with them.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

Yeah, I was just thinking out loud. The next step is to see if I can reproduce the spike in memory usage with a sample app, and then try and isolate a changelist that precipitates a large increase in memory usage. We have enough to go look for concrete data at this point.

Thanks!

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

I've branched this to a new discussion, since your symptoms are unique from the thread you posted in.

The best way for us to debug a crash is to reproduce it under a C++ debugger. A URL and steps to reproduce the problem, or a simple test example that demonstrates the issue would be ideal.

Short of that, a minidump would be useful.

This guide is a bit outdated, but it covers the gist of it:

https://helpx.adobe.com/flash-player/kb/report-flash-player-crash.htmlash

DEldstromAuthor

Participating Frequently

Its a bit hard to do a testcase since this problem is a part of a much bigger application but i have tracked it down, somehow to memory usage.

When opening a Alert dialog with the default modal behaviour with the blurred backround the app allocated 300mb memory for the blurred background with the application we develop. The fix for me was to write my own version of the Alert dialog and place a simple overlaying canvas behind the dialog window and disable the default modal. This, at least so far makes IE11 not crash so there has to be something weird with memory usage in IE11 (and thats what i see also when using Adobe Scout, memory spikes when opening modal with the blurred modal background).

Anyway, it seems as i have managed to work around the problem for now but i still think there is something not right with the current version of the flash player.

jeromiec83223024

Inspiring

That's a great lead, and depending on the browser, we *will* crash safely in out of memory conditions.

It's not surprising that you would see memory allocated when opening the modal, but ActionScript is a garbage collected language, and it should ultimately be recovered. That said, 300MB seems excessive. I'm definitely interested in researching that more deeply.

What version of the Flex SDK are you using?

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