Plexamp crashing in android auto

Plex Labs
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21

thats entirely possible (and i’ll do some more testing to see what I can confirm). I do know of a few spots on my typical drive that have an odd signal where I can show 4-5 bars of service,but in reality the tower isn’t receiving any (or very little) signal back from the phone. These spots usually give me issues with Spotify too though when i’m 100% streaming. The spots where i’ve ran into issues with PlexAmp thus far don’t usually have these issues.

Is it expected behavior the Plexamp to cache the next few songs queued up in a playlist that is playing? This seems to make sense, but wanted to confirm.

22

Plexamp caches a lot of songs, you can choose how many in advance and how much memory it can use in the settings. The Default is 5 on cell and 15 on wifi.

23

Cool, thanks for the confirmation. Here are a few more crashes from my drive dropping my daughter off at school this morning.

The following were full crashes resulting in playback stopping:

logcat_09-10-2021_08-48-39.txt (155.2 KB)
logcat_09-10-2021_08-35-39.txt (104.9 KB)
logcat_09-10-2021_07-41-43.txt (89.8 KB)
logcat_09-10-2021_07-34-01.txt (53.9 KB)

This was a crash as well, but music kept playing and the app came back without issue once it reloaded:

logcat_09-10-2021_08-58-21.txt (75.3 KB)

The drive to drop off my daughter was like 1.5 hours round trip. The frist 2 crashes happened on song 1 and 3 of my trip in some areas I know have some occasional network issues (though they usually stay at 3-5 bars, so I cannot say what the SNR was at the time.

On the way back, where the network is usually more stable, I was able to play 5-6 songs and skip around tracks without any issues, but as soon as I got close to a know network drop, it crashed again. So i’m still leaning towards something funny in that logic.

Is there any other special logging I can enable to expose more details for you all or even manually loading a apk with extra logging turned on? Also, if there are any extra LOGCAT items I should be logging specifically (maybe related to the network stack), let me know. At the moment, i’m just filtering for any logs with the keyword “Plex”.

Also, additional note in case its realted. I see some others with this issue mentioning it occuring as well. I am seeing my album artwork changing while listening to music to the wrong album artwork pretty regularly. Sometimes the art stays for the entire song, other tiems it changes from correct, to black, to wrong album, back to correct, back to black, and so on.

24

Hello everyone,
Since the last update plexamp is no longer crashing however the screen on my car’s headunit intermittently turns black and plexamp pauses. When the screen turns back on it plays normally. My headunit is a Sony XAV-AX100.

25

OK, some interesting things in that log:

[09-10 07:41:35.058 662:662 I/lowmemorykiller]
Kill 'tv.plex.labs.plexamp' (27290), uid 10356, oom_adj 100 to free 129788kB; reason: device is low on swap (0kB < 209712kB) and thrashing (206%)
...
[09-10 08:35:24.894 662:662 I/lowmemorykiller]
Kill 'tv.plex.labs.plexamp' (5594), uid 10356, oom_adj 100 to free 115132kB; reason: device is low on swap (0kB < 209712kB) and thrashing (204%)
...
[09-10 08:48:24.644 662:662 I/lowmemorykiller]
Kill 'tv.plex.labs.plexamp' (20605), uid 10356, oom_adj 100 to free 130456kB; reason: device is low on swap (0kB < 209712kB) and thrashing (206%)

This might explain why we’re not seeing the crash because it’s the system killing it.

We actually made a fix in this release to reduce the amount of CPU taken in these exact scenarios where the network is sketchy and we’re retrying, but it seems like maybe we missed something.

Can you provide Plexamp logs to go along with the lowmemorykiller logs so we can correlate?

26

Please see attached.

286946705974548.zip (158.5 KB)

27

Ive seen this on occasion too. The last long on my prior post was what you are describing, so hopefully we can get that sorted out here too.

28

Actually, I think I wasn’t fully awake and reading the message properly.

As best I can tell, Android is choosing to kill Plexamp because (a) it’s out of memory and (b) Plexamp is using ~130MB or so which it wants to reclaim. The system memory system/swap is thrashing, not Plexamp itself.

In almost all of the cases I could see, the system is actually actively in a playing state, so it seems pretty rude of Android to kill the process, especially per this overview which seems to imply that it’s sensitive to the different roles.

A possibly interesting data point would be to see what else is taking memory around the time the Plexamp process is killed.

29

I’ve gotta go pickup my daughter again this afternoon, so let me close all open apps and do a device restart and see if that helps at all. I am personally waiting to upgrade to a pixel 6 which has a lot more ram, so hopefully that will help long term, but it’s be nice if they didn’t kill the active app haha

30

Seriously.

31

Would a persistent notification be able to stop android from killing plexamp? My thought process it that it might improve the “out of memory” score card that android uses to determine what apps to kill first with low memory killer. I just read a page on the developer forums about this.

32

I’m sure you’ll be surprised, but closing all open apps forcefully and restarting the device yielded a basically trouble free hour of music listening. I’m going to do some testing on my wife’s phone as it has 8gb and I think she may be seeing the blackscreen issue chase is mentioning and not the full music stopping like I am on my 3xl.

I’d love to get this fixed, but am feeling fairly confident that once I get more ram and more storage this will likely go away. More testing will be done though and I’ll report back my findings.

33

What does your phone say when you check your ram in developer settings? Mine reads as an average of 3 out of 3.8 gb used. I also have a Google pixel 3 xl.

34

3.2 out of 3.8 on a phone rebooted only a few hours ago

35

I wonder if plexamp and android auto together uses more than 600mb of ram. Any ideas how I can test it? It seems like android services and the UI use about 2.5gb of ram most of the time when I checked developer settings.

36

3.7.1 has a fix for a memory leak and our preliminary reports from testing suggest it helps with this, let us know if it works for you all as well?

37

When is 3.7.1 going to be released? I haven’t seen it available yet.

38

I’ve been running the test version and so far its been improved. I’m still seeing that “crash” where the screen goes black, spinning loading icon comes up, and then the player reloads, but the audio remains playing. I provided a log of said issue to Elan via DM, but have attached it here as well. while annoying, at least I can still listen to music without it stopping every few songs :smiley:

logcat_09-14-2021_10-33-39.txt (92.0 KB)

39

@JK_Hoover - I’ve seen that black screen as well, and watching services, I don’t think it’s Plexamp in that case, I think that’s Android Auto reloading the GUI.

A longer while back AA would freeze completely on me, and my phone would get warm, sometimes I’d have to reboot the phone. That issue went away when I noticed Android Auto started reloading like this. I think this was Google’s fix to that AA / Phone freezing issue. As you said, same with mine, music keeps playing, just GUI reloads.

40

It’s out now.