Node: Node app causes windows 10 enterprise to become unstable

Created on 22 Sep 2017 · 8Comments · Source: nodejs/node

Version: v6.11.0
Platform: Win 10 enterprise 64 bit, ThinkPad T430s, i5-3220M @ 2.6GHz, 8G RAM
Subsystem: unknown / all / node

First off, I'm sure this is the result of my poor coding. That said, it seems like nothing I do in node should make my host OS (windows) unstable.

I have run a number of other node apps (including ones I've written) with no trouble at all. Some of these process very large amounts of data, also with no problem.

The most recent app I built causes all of windows to immediately become unstable / unusable after it exits. The node app completes correctly and reports no errors. Output appears to be correct (it is a simulation engine so it's nearly impossible to know for certain if it is absolutely correct; if I could know, I wouldn't have written the engine).

By unstable I mean the following: various windows apps such as chrome browser fail in mysterious ways such as not being able to download a file or navigate to a webpage. Other node based apps such as brackets editor fail immediately with a generic 'something bad happened and brackets needs to close' type message. Outlook refuses to send or receive emails and will not close properly. You can't shut windows down or restart windows.

Even when running the engine with a very small input data set (3 objects, total of 4k of data) it still causes the system to become unstable.

Basically I stated with a simple working simulation that did not have any issues. I added some OO bits to it that I wrote and now it crashes my host OS. All the bits I added were just straight forward JS managing a collection (array) of objects each of which represents one actor in my simulation environment. The actors 'move' around a space using the pathfinding.js module to calculate routes between points. Pretty mundane stuff really.

I'll continue to debug / investigate and update this issue with any further information. If I can get down to a reasonably small set of code that reproduces the problem I'll upload that. Right now it is pretty complicated and probably not worth trying to follow for someone else.

Again, I'm quite sure the underlying problem is my terrible code. I just don't understand why this is causing all of windows to go sideways.

question windows

Source

jbrown123

All 8 comments

@jbrown123 could you provide more details about your Node usage? Example code would be great.

bzoz on 22 Sep 2017

👍1

I've seen some strange behavior like that when my windows machine is very low on memory. Any chance your application uses a large amount of memory and pushes the system to the point where it is out of memory and/or swap ?

mhdawson on 22 Sep 2017

👍1

@bzoz I was in the middle of a tight deadline so I didn't have time to debug further. The code I was running was proprietary to my company so I can't share that. Now that my deadline is past, I can get back and try to reproduce this with some 'generic' code I can share.

jbrown123 on 3 Oct 2017

@mhdawson I don't think that's the problem. I monitored memory usage and my node app never got about a gig of memory used on a box with 8G of RAM. It generally hovered around 400-500M.

That said, I did find that shutting down pretty much everything else running on the box (outlook, chrome, etc.) caused it to not corrupt the OS so there is a possibility it is memory related. As I mentioned in my previous post, now that my deadline is past, I can spend some additional time trying to narrow down what the cause might be.

jbrown123 on 3 Oct 2017

Can you try running some memory testing software? This could be a hardware issue.

In any case let us know what you find!

bzoz on 3 Oct 2017

@jbrown123 did you made any progress here?

bzoz on 9 Oct 2017

No follow-up. I'll close this out.