Memory limitations in the flash player

Report · Aug 18, 2009

I've been running into some memory limitations in a flex application that I'm working on. As a test I wrote the code below to try and determine what the true memory limitations of a flex application running in the flash player are. What I've found is the following. On both the windows and linux machines there is a total of 4G of space available and in none of these cases was the OS near hitting the physical memory limit.

Max memory usage on various configurations:

flash player 10 on windows = ~650M

flash player 9 on windows = ~800M

flash player 10 on linux = unlimited (I was able to get up to 2.5G without any problems)

Has anyone else run into these limitations? Can anyone comment on possible work arounds to these limitations or provide any insight on why the flash player would have an artificial memory limit below what the OS can provide?

In the following application each button click takes up about 100M making it fairly easy to see at what point the flash player is crapping out.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application
     xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
      minHeight="600" minWidth="800">

     <mx:Script>
         <![CDATA[
                 import mx.formatters.NumberFormatter;

                 var outer:Array = new Array(1000);
                 var outerCnt:int = 0;
                 private const MBYTE : int = 1024 * 1024;
             private function onButtonClick():void {
                 var inner:Array = new Array(5000000);
                 var formatter:NumberFormatter = new NumberFormatter();
                 formatter.useThousandsSeparator = true;
                 var cnt:int = 0;
                 for(var i:int=0;i<50000000;i++) {
                     inner[cnt++] = "testsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstringtestsstring";

                 }

                 outer[outerCnt++] = inner;

                 text.text = formatter.format(flash.system.System.totalMemory/MBYTE);
             }


         ]]>
     </mx:Script>
     <mx:Button id="btnConfirmSubmit" click="onButtonClick()" label="click me"/>
     <mx:Text id="text"/>

</mx:Application>

Report · Aug 18, 2009

What error did you get at the limit? System.totalMemory is not the same as total process memory. See my blog for details?

Alex Harui

Flex SDK Developer

Adobe Systems Inc.

Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui

Report · Aug 19, 2009

In some cases I get the stack trace below and in other cases the application just crashes with no flex stack trace at all. Was there something specifically related on your blog that I should take a look at? Thanks.

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()

Report · Aug 19, 2009

There's a post on how to use the profiler that explains the difference between System.totalMemory and process memory. There may also be a limit on how much memory plug-ins can use, but I'd say that if you've used up 500MB, that's quite a bit and some sort of memory management strategy is in order. Otherwise, if the customer is using your app along with Excel and some other biggies, there'll be lots of thrashing.

Alex Harui

Flex SDK Developer

Adobe Systems Inc.

Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui

Report · Aug 20, 2009

Its a big application, there is no doubt about that but regardless we are trying to figure out why the flash player limits the amount of memory that the application can use. Especially when the machine itself has plenty of memory available. Was this by design? Is there any known workaround? Is this something that is expected to be fixed in upcoming releases?

Report · Aug 20, 2009

Like I said, System.totalMemory is not the same as process memory (and can be a fraction of total process memory). What kind of process memory do you see when System.totalMemory is at 500MB? AFAIK, the player has no official limits but the plug-in browser hosts might.

Alex Harui

Flex SDK Developer

Adobe Systems Inc.

Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui

Report · Aug 20, 2009

The process memory seems to stay fairly well in line with what totalMemory is reporting. For example when the test application that I posted earlier first launches the browser process takes around 200M. As I force the flex app to conume more memory the amount of memory that flex/flash reports being i n use and the amount that the process is actually using seem to grow in line with each other. So when flex/flash reports 300M in use the browser process is at about 500M and when flex/flash reports 500M the process is at 700M.

The reason I was suspecting that the flash player was the limitation is because we see this same behavior in firefox, crome and IE. I suppose its possible that under the hood somehow they all share a plugin framekwork which is imposing the limitation.

Thanks for the information, any other thoughts or possible workarounds (I'm not hopeful here) are appreciated.

Report · Aug 20, 2009

Each browser has its own plug-in architecture. Each browser may be imposing limits. The only workarounds I would suggest are ones that would get your app to run in less than 200MB. Unless you're hosting on a kiosk, that's quite a load to take against other apps running on the same system.

Alex Harui

Flex SDK Developer

Adobe Systems Inc.

Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui

Report · Aug 21, 2009

Yep, we are running the app on dedicated machines. In the end what this means is that the size of the applications that can be developed in flex is somewhat limited. Look for example at eclipse itself, it is currently running on my machine and using over 1G of memory. I'm running another fat client Java application that often takes well over 1G of memory. While that is a lot of memory to be using, it is the requirement of applications with enough functionality that they will use a lot of memory to operate. Perhaps flex/flash wasn't designed for that level of application.

In any case, thanks again for the information.

Report · Aug 21, 2009

It probably isn't a design issue. We have to live in browsers. Did you try the standalone player or AIR?

Alex Harui

Flex SDK Developer

Adobe Systems Inc.

Blog: http://blogs.adobe.com/aharui

Report · Feb 27, 2014

hi,

I am facing the exact same issue even in Adobe Air. Here is the code snippet. Any help/input would be of great help.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:WindowedApplication xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" 
                                                     xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" 
                                                     xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/mx">
          <fx:Script>
                    <![CDATA[
                              import mx.events.FlexEvent;
                              private var byteArray:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
                              protected function button1_clickHandler(event:MouseEvent):void
                              {
                                        var count:int = 1048576*600;
                                        for(var i:uint = 0; i<=count; i++)
                                        {
                                                  try{ 
                                                         byteArray.writeBoolean(true);
                                                  }catch(e:Error){
                                                        trace(e.message);
                                                        break;
                                                  }
                                        }
                              }
                    ]]>
          </fx:Script>
          <s:Button click="button1_clickHandler(event)"/>
</s:WindowedApplication>

Report · Feb 27, 2014

What error did you get and at what memory level?

Report · Feb 27, 2014

hi,

Thanks! I am getting "Error #1000: The system is out of memory." when it reahces around 546 MB.

Other details:

FlexSDk : 4.6.0

Adobe Air: 3.1

Published as: Captive Runtime

OS: win7 32 bit

Installed Ram: 4 GB

Virtual Memory: 3100 MB

Please let me know if you need any other info.

thanks

Sunil.P

Report · Feb 28, 2014

You might want to file a bug at bugbase.adobe.com. Or try a later version of AIR.

Report · Mar 02, 2014

I tried with Adobe Air V4, but still the crash issue persists. As suggested by you I will rasie a bug.

thanks & Regards

Sunil.P