'aww snap' error crashing online experiments

dockasaurusrex

heyo

Been trying to run a new online experiment using audio stimuli and seem to have about a 50% crash rate on chrome where experiments are interrupted with the very uninformative 'aw snap' screen

The experiment will basically finish when run on firefox but experiences quite frequent audio distortions (some are trippy). I havent tried other browsers.

Theres been a bit written about 'aw snap' error screen on the forum, but not the error code 11 variety and the advice given was rather unsatisfying as I recall. I realize that browser errors are a bit of a stretch for the osweb developers to fix (the experiment runs fine on the desktop so the error is online) but maybe there are changes that. can make to the experiment itself to make it run smoother/crash less frequently? Any thoughts along these lines would also be appreciated.

some words about the experiment - it involves playing audio clips while performing a visual task, a full experiment will play thousands of audio clips, the clips themselves are very short(30ms) and small (ogg format, 6kb) and there are 26 unique clips. the experiment lasts about 30 minutes and will tend to crash around the 20 minute mark (making debugging very time consuming) but then it also frequently completes. My browser is fully up to date, the crash occurs regardless of what extensions are on and also occurs in incognito/guest modes on chrome.

Here is a simplified version of the experiment which should recreate the crash. I had to attach it as a drive document as the stimuli need to be included.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1Ooz_zNmIU5fdKA_oTsrOKAO67CcKvS_g?usp=sharing

hope someone can help!

lvanderlinden

Hi @dockasaurusrex ,

Sorry for the late reply. I got the 'aww-span' message too. (But I think it was when my wifi temporarily lost connection.)

If you took all the necessary precautions, like cleaning cache and cookies, running in incognito mode and updating Chrome (and making sure the connection is stable?), I'm afraid I'm at loss too. Perhaps @sebastiaan could help?

Cheers,

Lotje

sebastiaan

Hi @dockasaurusrex ,

I get the same "Aw snap" error. I haven't seen this very often, but I assume it means that the browser process itself crashes, rather than that the JavaScript code crashes, which would give an informative error message. (The JavaScript equivalent of the "Python seems to have crashed" error, in other words.)

I think it will be hard to figure out where this error comes from. But you could try implementing sound playback yourself using an AudioContex in an inline_javascript item? Perhaps a slightly different implementation will not suffer from the same issue.

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/AudioContext

— Sebastiaan