Volley out of memory error, weird allocation attempt

Question

Sometimes randomly Volley crashes my app upon startup, it crashes in the application class and a user would not be able to open the app again until they go into settings and clear app data

java.lang.OutOfMemoryError
at com.android.volley.toolbox.DiskBasedCache.streamToBytes(DiskBasedCache.java:316)
at com.android.volley.toolbox.DiskBasedCache.readString(DiskBasedCache.java:526)
at com.android.volley.toolbox.DiskBasedCache.readStringStringMap(DiskBasedCache.java:549)
at com.android.volley.toolbox.DiskBasedCache$CacheHeader.readHeader(DiskBasedCache.java:392)
at com.android.volley.toolbox.DiskBasedCache.initialize(DiskBasedCache.java:155)
at com.android.volley.CacheDispatcher.run(CacheDispatcher.java:84)

The "diskbasedbache" tries to allocate over 1 gigabyte of memory, for no obvious reason

how would I make this not happen? It seems to be an issue with Volley, or maybe an issue with a custom disk based cache but I don't immediately see (from the stack trace) how to 'clear' this cache or do a conditional check or handle this exception

Insight appreciated

Answer 1

In the streamToBytes(), first it will new bytes by the cache file length, does your cache file was too large than application maximum heap size ?

private static byte[] streamToBytes(InputStream in, int length) throws IOException {
    byte[] bytes = new byte[length];
    ...
}

public synchronized Entry get(String key) {
    CacheHeader entry = mEntries.get(key);

    File file = getFileForKey(key);
    byte[] data = streamToBytes(..., file.length());
}

If you want to clear the cache, you could keep the DiskBasedCache reference, after clear time's came, use ClearCacheRequest and pass that cache instance in :

File cacheDir = new File(context.getCacheDir(), DEFAULT_CACHE_DIR);
DiskBasedCache cache = new DiskBasedCache(cacheDir);
RequestQueue queue = new RequestQueue(cache, network);
queue.start();

// clear all volley caches.
queue.add(new ClearCacheRequest(cache, null));

this way will clear all caches, so I suggest you use it carefully. of course, you can doing conditional check, just iterating the cacheDir files, estimate which was too large then remove it.

for (File cacheFile : cacheDir.listFiles()) {
    if (cacheFile.isFile() && cacheFile.length() > 10000000) cacheFile.delete();
}

Volley wasn't design as a big data cache solution, it's common request cache, don't storing large data anytime.

------------- Update at 2014-07-17 -------------

In fact, clear all caches is final way, also isn't wise way, we should suppressing these large request use cache when we sure it would be, and if not sure? we still can determine the response data size whether large or not, then call setShouldCache(false) to disable it.

public class TheRequest extends Request {
    @Override
    protected Response<String> parseNetworkResponse(NetworkResponse response) {
        // if response data was too large, disable caching is still time.
        if (response.data.length > 10000) setShouldCache(false);
        ...
    }
}