Cloud Functions for Firebase killed due to memory

Question

I keep getting a sporadic error from Cloud Functions for Firebase when converting a relatively small image (2mb). When successful, the function only takes about 2000ms or less to finish, and according to Image Magick documentation should I should not see any problems.

I tried increasing the buffer size for the command, which isn't allows from within Firebase, and I tried to find alternatives to .spawn() as that could be overloaded with garbage and slow things down. Nothing works.

Answer 1

You can set this from within your Cloud Function file on Firebase.

const runtimeOpts = {
  timeoutSeconds: 300,
  memory: '1GB'
}

exports.myStorageFunction = functions
  .runWith(runtimeOpts)
  .storage
  .object()
  .onFinalize((object) = > {
    // do some complicated things that take a lot of memory and time
  });

Take from the docs here: https://firebase.google.com/docs/functions/manage-functions#set_timeout_and_memory_allocation

Don't forget to then run firebase deploy from your terminal.

Answer 2

It seems the default ImageMagick resource config in Firebase Cloud Functions doesn't match the actual memory allocated to the function.

Running identify -list resource in the context of a Firebase Cloud Function yields:

File       Area         Memory        Map       Disk   Thread  Throttle       Time
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 18750    4.295GB       2GiB       4GiB  unlimited        8         0   unlimited  

The default memory allocated to a FCF is 256MB - the default ImageMagick instance thinks it has 2GB and therefore doesn't allocate buffer from disk and can easily try to over allocate memory causing the function to fail on Error: memory limit exceeded. Function killed.

One way is to increase required memory as suggested above - although there's still risk IM will try to over allocate depending on your use case and outliers.

Safer yet would be to set the correct memory limit to IM as part of the image manipulation process using -limit memory [your limit]. You can figure out your approx memory usage by running your IM logic with `-debug Cache' - it will show you all the buffers allocated, their sizes and if they were memory or disk.

If IM hits the memory limit it will start allocating buffers on disk (memory mapped and then regular disk buffers.You'll have to consider your specific balance between I/O performance vs memory cost. Price of every additional byte of memory you allocate to your FCF is multiplied by 100ms of usage - so that can grow quickly.

Answer 3

The latest firebase deploy command does overwrite the memory allocation to default 256MB and timeout up to 60s.

Alternatively , to specify the desired memory allocation and maximum timeout , I use gcloud command such as:

gcloud beta functions deploy YourFunctionName --memory=2048MB --timeout=540s

Other options, please refer to:

https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud/reference/beta/functions/deploy

Answer 4

Figuring out from UI is a bit tricky so here are some guided screenshots:
Go to url https://console.cloud.google.com/functions/list

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You can also increase default timeout of 60 sec