Excessive memory accumulation in OSWeb experiment

eboonst

Hello cogsci community,

I'm designing an online experiment in which participants are tasked to navigate a grid world and collect resources.

For this purpose I'm redrawing a canvas() object on each iteration (whenever the participant makes a move).

In principle everything functions as it should, but over the course of ~2000 iterations, my experiment accumulates ~1700mb of memory, most of which seems related to rendering / drawing (see screenshot of heap snapshot).

Screenshot 2024-12-19 at 12.54.49.png

I've tried separating out a static and dynamic canvas, but this doesn't work because (unless I'm missing something) I cannot layer canvases. I also tried changing parts of the canvas as is possible in python, but unless I did it wrong this doesn't seem supported in javascript.

My question is: given that I'm constantly redrawing my canvas and everything in it, is the accumulation of memory to be expected, or is this indicative of something going (or me doing) something wrong? If the latter, would you have any recommendations for improvement?

Many thanks!

sebastiaan

Hi @eboonst ,

Are you running the latest version of OpenSesame/ OSWeb? There used to be memory leaks in OSWeb, but these should have all been resolved by now. If you are running the latest version, could you upload the experiment so that I can see what might cause this issue?

— Sebastiaan