Memory Leak on streaming

[ChrisMidtempo]

Trying to build a semi-permanent streaming platform using Howler, but I'm getting a steady memory leak that is consuming about a Gb of memory / hour, meaning the server runs out of memory with a system crash every 4-5 hours... which is a lot less permanent than I'd like

The playlist is generated on the fly by an internal API which returns next track audio file URIs (hosted on S3), artist/song info, and the cue points.

The streaming code loads the howl into an object, either cart[1].sound or cart[2].sound depending on which has just finished playing. When a track is over, it unloads the audio (and tries to clean out the object with cart[#] = {}), then gets the next track and creates the next howl.

Either js/howler isn't clearing the howl out of memory 'cause I haven't understood things properly, or web-audio isn't freeing memory (in which case I'm not sure what to do...).

There's a simplified version of the code here: https://pastebin.com/tQifBFgC

FTR: am running this on a headless browser on AWS EC2 (Ubuntu 20.04). Getting the same memory consumption with both Chrome and Firefox.

[ChrisMidtempo]

Things I've tried to date:

• creating the howls as separate entities, rather than part of an object (i.e. sound1, sound2, instead of cart[1].sound, cart[2].sound)
• using new entities for each Howl rather than bouncing between two (i.e. sound1, sound2, sound3, sound4...)
• adding a delay/setTimeout between stop() and unload() [slightly relevant suggestion from this bug report]
• Chrome (99.0.4844.51) & Firefox (97.0.2) on a remote server
• Chrome (99.0.4844.51), Firefox (96.0.1), Safari (15.1) on my local machine
• Various Chrome command line switches (including, but not limited to: '--audio-buffer-size=4096', '--aggressive-cache-discard', '--disk-cache-size = 1073741824'...)

The memory issue is definitely in the browser, rather than some other part of the chain

Finally, here's a pretty graph to make this post look more interesting [note that there's some garbage collection after the fifth track, but then all my hopes slowly crumble away...]

[ChrisMidtempo]

Fixed.

Had switched html5 off to avoid autoplay issues, but that meant Web Audio and garbage collection issues. Problem resolved by switching html5 to true and dealing with the audio auto-starting by controling the browser with Puppeteer. No more memory problems.