2 ms·

And in fact, I don't think they have fixed it. I've seen "Error 5" plenty of times in Chrome. It seemingly occurs whenever I have a lot (100+) of tabs open for

by derefr 3y ago

And in fact, I don't think they have fixed it. I've seen "Error 5" plenty of times in Chrome. It seemingly occurs whenever I have a lot (100+) of tabs open for any site where each page allocates at least one accelerated drawing canvas (a literal <canvas>, or a <video>, or a .gif <img>.) I've seen it happen on Reddit (but only new reddit, not old reddit!) and on a number of other sites. I hypothesize that Chrome simply has a global (i.e. cross-tab) per-toplevel-origin limit to the number of allocated accelerated drawing canvases it's willing to allow; and that when you go over it, Chrome forcibly de-allocates all the existing drawing canvases used by other tabs that have that toplevel origin loaded, thereby causing them to crash. It's probably a measure designed to prevent a site from from DoSing your computer by just allocating an infinite number of canvases.

nonethewiser 3y ago
They said it also crashes when they just load the gif. It seems hard to believe they always had tons of tabs open for these tests.
- derefr 3y ago
  It doesn't have to be tons of open tabs; it can just as well be one tab that makes tons of accel draw contexts all on its own — maybe temporary hidden <canvas> draw contexts that it never cleans up. But a dev would usually end up hitting that kind of problem during development; whereas, if the problem never arises through "normal use" but instead requires having 100+ open tabs on the site to trigger, that bug might go unnoticed all throughout the QA process. I can also extend my speculation about all the times I've personally seen "Error 5", although this is probably dipping into superstition territory: I think the per-toplevel-origin draw-context limit isn't static, but is influenced by the amount of VRAM available on the computer as a whole. So on an extremely VRAM-constrained system like a Raspberry Pi (or on a system that's running Cyberpunk 2077 on one display and Chrome on another, sharing a GPU) the per-toplevel-origin limit on accel draw contexts might be dropped as low as, say, 5: an amount low enough that just having one extra .gif on the single tab of the site you have open might be enough to make the tab fall over.

by derefr 3y ago

nonethewiser 3y ago

They said it also crashes when they just load the gif. It seems hard to believe they always had tons of tabs open for these tests.

derefr 3y ago
It doesn't have to be tons of open tabs; it can just as well be one tab that makes tons of accel draw contexts all on its own — maybe temporary hidden <canvas> draw contexts that it never cleans up. But a dev would usually end up hitting that kind of problem during development; whereas, if the problem never arises through "normal use" but instead requires having 100+ open tabs on the site to trigger, that bug might go unnoticed all throughout the QA process. I can also extend my speculation about all the times I've personally seen "Error 5", although this is probably dipping into superstition territory: I think the per-toplevel-origin draw-context limit isn't static, but is influenced by the amount of VRAM available on the computer as a whole. So on an extremely VRAM-constrained system like a Raspberry Pi (or on a system that's running Cyberpunk 2077 on one display and Chrome on another, sharing a GPU) the per-toplevel-origin limit on accel draw contexts might be dropped as low as, say, 5: an amount low enough that just having one extra .gif on the single tab of the site you have open might be enough to make the tab fall over.