Crash on iOS when loading more than 47 images

I have experienced the weirdest bug since a few months. I’ve upgraded my iPad Pro to the latest iOS (from 9.3.1 to 10.3.3) and suddenly my app won’t launch in AUM and AudioBus3 anymore.

The only clue is the cryptic

Error Domain=_UIViewServiceInterfaceErrorDomain Code=3 "(null)" 
UserInfo={Message=Service Connection Interrupted}

message which is preceded by a “Memory warning” in the Console. Googling this message is very unsatisfying.

Now I’ve spent the whole day tracking this down and it seems that when loading more than 47 images (this is a random value), the app crashes, as it if were out of memory, which is clearly not the case, Xcode is showing 274MB memory usage (and this is under the debugger).

There was another issue when migrating (the image resampling was terribly slow, and after setting the resampling quality to low, it got better), but I am not sure these things are related in any way…

Has anybody made similar experiences yet? Is it possible that Apple changed their memory handling policy? BTW the standalone version is running fine without issues and the plugin loads in Beatmaker 3 and GarageBand iOS.

OK after more digging and searching for potential memory limitations, I stumbled over this post:

According to Core Audio engineering the memory limit imposed for AU Extensions on iOS is 300 MB for 32-bit devices and 360 MB on 64-bit devices. These are performance considerations as you can expect from iOS devices having limited shared resources. [source]

This would explain the crashs (I am still dramatically underwhelmed by the level of error reporting on iOS).

This problem might also be related to this forum post:

and +1 for a virtual method AudioProcessor::didReceiveMemoryWarning

4 Likes