Monday, September 23, 2013

aprs.fi within iOS 7 Safari web browser

When opening aprs.fi using the iOS 7 Safari browser on an iPad Mini, the browser is quite consistently killed by the operating system due to an out-of-memory situation, especially if there are a lot of stations in your area to show. This looks pretty much like the browser crashed, but the device's console log displays the OOM errors quite nicely. The same happens when I try to use Chrome. It worked pretty fine on iOS 6 on the same device.

It seems to me that iOS 7 grabs more memory itself, leaving less memory available for the applications, and the devices with 512 MB memory (or less) don't have enough to load aprs.fi in the browser when a lot of stations are brought to view. iPad Mini and iPad 2 have 512 megabytes, the original iPad 1 has 256 MB, the 3rd- and 4th-generation iPads ("new iPad") have 1 GB (specifications).

Sep 22 19:53:51 Minipad MobileSafari[1407] : Received memory warning.
Sep 22 19:53:53 Minipad MobileSafari[1407] : Received memory warning.
Sep 22 19:53:54 Minipad com.apple.launchd[1] (UIKitApplication:com.apple.mobilesafari[0xe421][1407]) : (UIKitApplication:com.apple.mobilesafari[0xe421]) Exited: Killed: 9

The same probably applies to iPhones, but I didn't upgrade to 7 yet.

There's not much I can do about this, other than make it somehow load less stations and lines on the map initially.

Or release a native iOS application which doesn't process the map data in Javascript, and will be able to keep its memory use lower that way.