"boost.useWorker: true" in combination with frequent updates results in a consistent tab crash

[Venlious]

Description

An application I develop for recently introduced 5 seconds resolution time series data with a refresh interval of 5 seconds. There are about 3 charts on a certain page which are regularly being updated with new data. We noticed that after running the application for about 5 minutes, the tab would always and consistently crash (Error code 5).

Inspecting the performance monitor in the developer tools didn't reveal any memory or performance issues. The more consistent metric for predicting when a tab will crash turned out to be by looking at the network requests. On our page it would consistently crash after about ±900 network requests had been made which happened to be after about 5 minutes.

After further investigation, it turned out setting boost.useWorker: false fixed the issue altogether. It would appear that something doesn't seem to be going well when you are frequently updating data in while having boost.useWorker: true. The network requests were closely tied as a metric as the worker messages show up in the network tab.

There seems to be an issue with how billboard.js uses worker threads in Chromium based browsers specifically. I was not able to repeat this issue on Firefox.

Steps to check or reproduce

If you leave this Codepen running for about 3 minutes in a Chromium based browser, it will crash the tab. If you were to look at the network requests, it will crash after about 300 network requests have been received (since the worker messages show up in the network tab).

https://codepen.io/venlious/pen/dyLdGoy

[netil]

@Venlious, thanks for the report.

useWorker options is implemented creating WebWorker URL on the fly using URL.createObjectURL() and then releases via revokeObjectURL().

I could reproduce in Chrome versions 123~124, but it doesn't reproduce from 125.
Also tested on other browsers and couldn't reproduce the issue.

Browsers	Version	Crash
Chrome	123.0.6312.107	O
Chrome	123.0.6312.124	O
Chrome Beta	124.0.6367.29	O
Chrome Canary	125.0.6411.3	X
Chrome Canary	125.0.6412.0	X
Edge	123.0.2420.81 (arm64)	O
Firefox	124.0.1 (64-bit)	X
Firefox	124.0.2 (64-bit)	X
Safari	17.4.1(19618.1.15.11.14)	X
Safari	17.4.1 (iOS)	X

NOTE: All the tests ran on MacOS 14.4.1(23E224) - Apple Silicon, unless specified

Don't know exactly the cause of the issue, but it seems chrome's issue.

[netil]

Ref. of Chrome error code 5: vercel/next.js#39731

[netil]

The chrome stable became 125.0.6422.61, and it doesn't crash.
Closing the issue.