I have been experiencing issues similar to what JK_Hoover has been describing on my Pixel 4XL which for what it’s worth, has more ram than his 3XL. I am also considering picking up a Pixel 6 Pro soon, so if this is indeed a RAM issue, I am hoping that I may be able to resolve it by brute forcing it that way since I will be doubling my RAM. I currently only play downloaded files, but will be upgrading to an unlimited data plan soon, so I will likely start streaming soon also.
Sometimes the “Plexamp doesn’t seem to be working right now” message will appear for me just a few seconds after hitting play, other times it won’t occur until I am on about track 3-5 or so. Sometimes I can switch to a different music or podcast app out of frustration and Android Auto will continue to work fine, other times it will keep reloading Android Auto/navigation until I reboot my phone, which definitely isn’t fun when I actually need navigation to work, so I have become hesitant to use PlexAmp in those scenarios unfortunately.
I have been seeing this behavior on both wired and wireless Android Auto across 2 different car makes (not that it should make much of a difference, but hey, more data, right?) I did however JUST pull the 3.7.1 update, so I will give that a try soon. Anecdotally, I have also seen Android Auto “crash” in a similar way when opening my camera with Android Auto running (don’t ask lol), so I think the speculation that it may be a RAM usage issue and/or memory leak is potentially on the right track.
I am also in IT and pretty familiar with Android, so if you guys would like some logcats or any other form of testing on my end, let me know. I would love to help get this resolved if I can!
Phone running out of memory and Android killing Plexamp.
Logcat event looks like:
09-17 14:11:47.739 613 613 I lowmemorykiller: Kill ‘com.plexamp’ (26255), uid 10355, oom_adj 100 to free 208820kB; reason: device is low on swap (0kB < 209712kB) and thrashing (200%)
Next track memory leak leading to out of memory - Fixed in 3.7.1
AA itself running out of memory and reloading the GUI.
This one you can tell when this happens as the music never stops, but the AA screen goes black and re-loads.
The problem with #1 and #3 are that it’s out of Plex’s control. It would seemt that at times, (such as opening the camera) the system needs a lot of memory and terminates Plexamp.
While it is true that Plex technically has no direct influence over how AA behaves and how it decides to handle process killing, I suppose one could argue that they do have control over the memory footprint of their app, so if the app in its current state is regularly exceeding the amount of memory that AA is comfortable allocating to it, then it may be of interest to try to lower PlexAmp’s memory usage. In terms of scenario 3 where AA is reloading the GUI without killing the music, I think that may be a last ditch effort on AA’s part to try to reclaim memory without destructively killing the running apps if it can help it. At least, that’s my theory from a UX and safety standpoint.
I haven’t run a memory profiler or anything like that to compare it to say Spotify or PocketCasts (or YouTube Music in the past), which are the other main audio apps that I use with Android Auto, but I have only ever seen this issue while, and sometimes directly after using PlexAmp on Android Auto. I wonder if something like Ultrablur is contributing to higher memory usage? I don’t want to play too much armchair developer here, I’m just spitballing of course.
We have. Android Auto can take up to 1GB of RAM Plexamp uses at most around 500MB, spiking to 800MB when other related Google services start up (a bit weird, some store-related services run occasionally and are attached in accounting to Plexamp).
Understood that there is a lot of memory being required by AA and that is causing Android to swap processes out to make room. That said, I’m on a Pixel 4 XL and typically run PlexAmp and Google Maps for navigation. When memory runs low, either of those processes might be interrupted. PlexAmp will not run for more that 30-60 minutes without exhausting memory resources and wreaking havoc. At any point, I can switch to Pandora for music and it will work without any errors for indefinitely.
I will offer that I have noticed PlexAmp appearing to have problems offering the right album art. I don’t know if this is a symptom of running short on RAM or the cause of running short on RAM.
Finally, regardless of how memory hungry AA is, it seems that other applications live in that environment without error. PlexAmp should be able to as well.
Great news! I was hopeful that you were working on it, but the thread had sounded like it was a lost cause. Anyway, I cannot wait! Being forced into Pandora hurts my ears.
Plexamp uses at most around 500MB, spiking to 800MB when other related Google services start up (a bit weird, some store-related services run occasionally and are attached in accounting to Plexamp).