kevincennis / mixgrid Goto Github PK

Just spent the past hour debugging (and eventually fixing) a really nasty memory leak in Chrome, but in the process, discovered that the tab's memory is almost 1GB.

Internally, Web Audio represents each buffer as 32-bit / 44.1 kHz. So that's 10MB per minute of mono audio. So, the raw ArrayBuffers alone on ten 4-minute mono tracks is over 400MB.

Luckily, the memory usage stays stable as BufferSources come and go, which is good, but that number is definitely concerning even though it's sort of expected.

Anyway, I need to see if there's any way to get that number down.

So far, the only idea I have is kind of crazy:

1. Break each ArrayBuffer into 10-second (or whatever) chunks
2. Store them with Chrome's FileSystem API
3. Read them on-demand during playback and create AudioBuffers on the fly

This is more-or-less how native DAWs work. Entire buffers don't get stored in memory, they just load chunks as needed. But I really have no idea whether or not that approach will work in the browser. I also don't really want to even try that.

As long as we're not crashing and performance is good, I guess high memory usage is okay though. Have to keep on eye on this.