Currently running a PsychoPy experiment through Pavlovia. It has quite a bit of audio data, so that it downloads quite a bit at the beginning (resources /163). I’m recruiting through Prolific. For the most part, the study has been running smoothly, but I had one participant report that:
- It crashed after 131 resources were loaded.
- They reloaded and it successfully loaded all resources, but then the buttons on the screen (‘next’ buttons) were not working. They couldn’t complete the experiment.
They’re using a Chromebook. Is this a known problem for ChromeOS / for laptops without a lot of processing power?
More likely limited RAM than the processor, if I had to guess. Assuming they are using Chrome as their web browser (which, on ChromeOS, they almost certainly are), then the most likely explanation is that pre-loading all the audio files requires too much RAM and it’s causing Chrome to freeze.
That kind of performance limitation just is what it is and there isn’t much to be done about it. Chrome is not that memory-efficient, JavaScript itself is not that memory-efficient, and if it’s a system that only has 4-8GB of RAM to start with, loading 163 audio files on top of loading the website itself and running Chrome (especially if they have any other tabs open) might just be too much for it.
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