iPad/iPhone browser crashing when loading images in Javascript

Question

I'm trying to build an image gallery in Safari that mimics the iPad photo app. It works perfectly, except that once I load more than 6MB or so worth of images either by adding them to the DOM or creating new Image objects, new images either stop loading or the browser crashes. This problem is widespread enough (with everyone else hitting up against the same limit) that I've ruled out my Javascript code as the culprit.

Given that you can stream much more than a few MB in a element or through the in-browser media player, this limit seems unnecessary, and there should be some kind of workaround available. Perhaps by freeing up memory or something else.

I also came across this reference for UIWebView.

"JavaScript allocations are also limited to 10 MB. Safari raises an exception if you exceed this limit on the total memory allocation for JavaScript."

Which matches what I'm seeing fairly well. Is it possible to deallocate objects in Javascript, or does Safari/UIWebView keep a running total and never lets go? Alternately, is there any workaround to load in data another way that doesn't eat up this 10MB?

Answer 1

Update: I think there's an even easier way to do this, depending on your application. Instead of having multiple images, if you simply have one <img> element or Image object (or maybe two, like a 'this' image and a 'next' image if you need animations or transitions) and simply update the .src, .width, .height and so on, you should never get near the 10MB limit. If you wanted to do a carousel application, you'd have to use smaller placeholders first. You might find this technique might be easier to implement.

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I think I may actually have found a work-around to this.

Basically, you'll need to do some deeper image management and explicitly shrink any image you don't need. You'd normally do this by using document.removeChild(divMyImageContainer) or $("myimagecontainer").empty() or what have you, but on Mobile Safari this does absolutely nothing; the browser simply never deallocates the memory.

Instead, you need to update the image itself so it takes up very little memory; and you can do that by changing the image's src attribute. The quickest way I know of to do that is to use a data URL. So instead of saying this:

myImage.src="/path/to/image.png"

...say this instead:

myImage.src="data:image/gif;base64,AN_ENCODED_IMAGE_DATA_STRING"

Below is a test to demonstrate it working. In my tests, my large 750KB image would eventually kill the browser and halt all JS exectution. But after resetting src, I"ve been able to load in instances of the image over 170 times. An explanation of how the code works is below as well.

var strImagePath = "http://path/to/your/gigantic/image.jpg";
var arrImages = [];
var imgActiveImage = null
var strNullImage = "data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhEAAOALMAAOazToeHh0tLS/7LZv/0jvb29t/f3//Ub//ge8WSLf/rhf/3kdbW1mxsbP//mf///yH5BAAAAAAALAAAAAAQAA4AAARe8L1Ekyky67QZ1hLnjM5UUde0ECwLJoExKcppV0aCcGCmTIHEIUEqjgaORCMxIC6e0CcguWw6aFjsVMkkIr7g77ZKPJjPZqIyd7sJAgVGoEGv2xsBxqNgYPj/gAwXEQA7";
var intTimesViewed = 1;
var divCounter = document.createElement('h1');
document.body.appendChild(divCounter);

var shrinkImages = function() {
    var imgStoredImage;
    for (var i = arrImages.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
        imgStoredImage = arrImages[i];
        if (imgStoredImage !== imgActiveImage) {
            imgStoredImage.src = strNullImage;
        }
    }
};
var waitAndReload = function() {
    this.onload = null;
    setTimeout(loadNextImage,2500);
};
var loadNextImage = function() {
    var imgImage = new Image();
    imgImage.onload = waitAndReload;
    document.body.appendChild(imgImage);
    imgImage.src = strImagePath + "?" + (Math.random() * 9007199254740992);
    imgActiveImage = imgImage;
    shrinkImages()
    arrImages.push(imgImage);
    divCounter.innerHTML = intTimesViewed++;
};
loadNextImage()

This code was written to test my solution, so you'll have to figure out how to apply it to your own code. The code comes in three parts, which I will explain below, but the only really important part is imgStoredImage.src = strNullImage;

loadNextImage() simply loads a new image and calls shrinkImages(). It also assigns an onload event which is used to begin the process of loading another image (bug: I should be clearing this event later, but I'm not).

waitAndReload() is only here to allow the image time to show up on the screen. Mobile Safari is pretty slow and displaying big images, so it needs time after the image has loaded to paint the screen.

shrinkImages() goes through all previously loaded images (except the active one) and changes the .src to the dataurl address.

I'm using a file-folder image for the dataurl here (it was the first dataurl image I could find). I'm using it simply so you can see the script working. You'll probably want to use a transparent gif instead, so use this data url string instead: data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAP///wAAACH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAICRAEAOw==