Auspice regularly freezes/crashes entire Brave browser, not just single tab

[corneliusroemer]

Current Behavior
About every 10-20min browsing Auspice trees with ~3000-4000 genomes my whole Brave browser will hang infinitely when I zoom into a branch. This doesn't happen on every branch click, by far not, but maybe on every 100th or so.

When I use Firefox, I have not encountered this issue.

Expected behavior
Auspice should not hang my browser, I have enough RAM, the computer is fast enough etc.

Your environment: if browsing Nextstrain online

• Operating system: macOS Big Sur v11.6
• Processor: 2.2 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7
• RAM: 16GB
• Graphics: Radeon Pro 555X 4GB
• Plugged into power
• Browser: Version 1.30.89 Chromium: 94.0.4606.81 (Official Build) (x86_64)

[corneliusroemer]

Auspice just crashed Brave again. Is there any way I can collect logs to help you debug @jameshadfield?

This is what htop showed when Brave was loading infinitely. No memory problem, but 100% CPU. Weird.

[tsibley]

@corneliusroemer Can you try using another browser for a bit to see if this is limited to Brave or more widespread for you?

[corneliusroemer]

@tsibley what else shall I do than use Firefox which I already do and where the problem doesn't occur?

When I use Firefox, I have not encountered this issue.

Do I need to use Edge? 😱

[jameshadfield]

Is there any way I can collect logs

You could try having the browser console open and see if it prints any messages before/as it freezes, but from what you report this seems unlikely.

[corneliusroemer]

Right, yes, I need to speculatively collect logs, I'll see what I can do. This crash has happened at least 5-10 times now, so it's not irrelevant (at least for me ;) )

[tsibley]

@corneliusroemer Not Edge, no, but Chrome or Chromium instead of Brave would be a decent comparison.

[corneliusroemer]

Ok, just installed Chrome on Mac and crash appears after doing a few branch clicks on https://nextstrain.org/groups/neherlab/ncov/sa-chile

Has anyone tried to reproduce on a different computer also running Mac, ideally Big Sur?

Now I tried to collect logs and the crash doesn't happen anywhere. Argh!

[jameshadfield]

Using Chrome 95.0.4638.54 on MacOS 11.5 with the sa-chile dataset and clicking around branches madly I... cannot reproduce this :(

[corneliusroemer]

Have you tried Brave? I mean, sure, not many use Brave but the cause may still be interesting?

[corneliusroemer]

This bug keeps coming up for me using Auspice and Brave, even when I use Brave Beta or Brave in incognito without any extensions (to rule out extensions causing it).

All I have to do is:

1. Open https://nextstrain.org/zika in any Brave browser (normal, incognito, Beta)
2. Select "show aa muts" instead of clades
3. Click on a node
4. Browser freezes

I've applied triage labels:

• 4: Crash (it's a total crash of the browser, not just of the window but of the entire Browser, including all windows, so pretty bad)
• 2: Users won't like this once they notice, it's quite restrictive, I have to remember to not use Auspice using Brave, if I do, it'll eventually cause me to have to kill Brave using htop and restart all over
• 1: Few users, since apparently no one else uses Brave with Auspice or they don't encounter the error?

Maybe this is platform specific, too, could only be Brave on Intel macOS for example narrowing even further.

[jameshadfield]

@corneliusroemer -- following those steps (well, as well as I could, step 2 isn't applicable for zika) in brave 1.35.101 on MacOS 11.5 (M1 chip) I can't get it to freeze. I also tried with https://nextstrain.org/ncov/gisaid/global.

[victorlin]

@corneliusroemer I tried using Brave 1.35.101 on an Intel Mac (macOS 12.2.1; 2.9 GHz Dual-Core Intel Core i5; 16GB) and couldn't repro 😕