FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory

The problem

Hi,

I am currently using Appium for a test application that monitors the status of an Android smartphone. In particular my application runs for many hours and needs to collect many screenshots of the smartphone during the execution (by using the getScreenshot function).

After some hours and hundreds of screenshots collected the Appium server crashed with the following error:

FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory

In order to reproduce the issue I guess it is enough to put the getScreenshot function in an infinite loop.

Environment

• Appium version: 1.14.2
• Desktop OS/version: Windows 10 1903 64 bit
• Node.js version: 12.6.0
• Npm or Yarn package manager:
• Mobile platform/version under test: Android 9 Pie
• Real device: Samsung S9
• Additional parameters to run Appium: --relaxed-security

Link to Appium logs

I collected log output from two different crashes:

https://gist.github.com/ptagl/0c189d8343daebc22a8e580e4d02b7a1 https://gist.github.com/ptagl/a33dac0702cf55e6e5dbaeb4ae1190be

[mykola-mokhnach]

Yep, the trace look much better now. Waiting for the PR to be reviewed and polished. Thank you for the assistance

[ptagl]

The steps I followed to take the snapshot are:

1. Open the terminal and go to the Appium module folder (in case of Windows OS something like C:\Users\username\AppData\Roaming\npm\node_modules\appium).

2. Run the command node --inspect . and copy the URL printed on the screen (something like ws://127.0.0.1:9229/0f2c936f-b1cd-4ac9-aab3-f63b0f33d55e).

3. Open Edge or Chrome and browse to edge://inspect or chrome://inspect respectively. Then paste the URL (or wait for the entry to appear automatically) and press “Inspect”.

4. In the new window go to the “Memory” tab, select “Allocation instrumentation on timeline” and check “Record allocation stacks”, then start the profiling.

5. When you collected enough allocations or the application crashed, stop the profiling, wait for the finalization and then save to file.

6. Optional: if the snapshot file it too big, zip it.