I have a webpage that rapidly streams JSON from the server and displays bits of it, about 10 times/second. One part is a base64-encoded PNG image. I've found a few different ways to display the image, but all of them cause unbounded memory usage. It rises from 50mb to 2gb within minutes. Happens with Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. Haven't tried IE.
I discovered the memory usage first by looking at Activity Monitor.app -- the Google Chrome Renderer process continuously eats memory. Then, I looked at Chrome's Resource inspector (View
> Developer
> Developer Tools
, Resources
), and I saw that it was caching the images. Every time I changed the img src
, or created a new Image() and set its src
, Chrome cached it. I can only imagine the other browsers are doing the same.
Is there any way to control this caching? Can I turn it off, or do something sneaky so it never happens?
Edit: I'd like to be able to use the technique in Safari/Mobile Safari. Also, I'm open to other methods of rapidly refreshing an image if anyone has any ideas.
Here are the methods I've tried. Each one resides in a function that gets called on AJAX completion.
Method 1 - Directly set the src
attribute on an img
tag
Fast. Displays nicely. Leaks like crazy.
$('#placeholder_img').attr('src', 'data:image/png;base64,' + imgString);
Method 2 - Replace img
with a canvas
, and use drawImage
Displays fine, but still leaks.
var canvas = document.getElementById("placeholder_canvas");
var ctx = canvas.getContext("2d");
var img = new Image();
img.onload = function() {
ctx.drawImage(img, 0, 0);
}
img.src = "data:image/png;base64," + imgString;
Method 3 - Convert to binary and replace canvas
contents
I'm doing something wrong here -- the images display small and look like random noise. This method uses a controlled amount of memory (grows to 100mb and stops), but it is slow, especially in Safari (~50% CPU usage there, 17% in Chrome). The idea came from this similar SO question: Data URI leak in Safari (was: Memory Leak with HTML5 canvas)
var img = atob(imgString);
var binimg = [];
for(var i = 0; i < img.length; i++) {
binimg.push(img.charCodeAt(i));
}
var bytearray = new Uint8Array(binimg);
// Grab the existing image from canvas
var ctx = document.getElementById("placeholder_canvas").getContext("2d");
var width = ctx.canvas.width,
height = ctx.canvas.height;
var imgdata = ctx.getImageData(0, 0, width, height);
// Overwrite it with new data
for(var i = 8, len = imgdata.data.length; i < len; i++) {
imgdata.data[i-8] = bytearray[i];
}
// Write it back
ctx.putImageData(imgdata, 0, 0);
I have used different methods to solve this problem, none of them works. It seems that memory leaks when img.src = base64string and those memory can never get released. Here is my solution.
Note that you should convert base64 to jpeg buffer.
My Electron app updating img every 50ms, and memory doesn't leak. Forget about disk usage. Chrome's memory management piss me off.
I had a very similar issue.
Setting img.src to dataUrl Leaks Memory
Long story short, I simply worked around the Image element. I use a javascript decoder to decode and display the image data onto a canvas. Unless the user tries to download the image, they'll never know the difference either. The other downside is that you're going to be limited to modern browsers. The up side is that this method doesn't leak like a sieve :)