Pavlovia Experiment - Stuck on loading

[naomileenaomi]

@jonathan.kominsky

The favicon error is a red herring, not really related to the problem at all. What it does suggest is that the page has been refreshed or reloaded, which is why it lands back on initializing the experiment, and that I’m rather confused by.

I agree with Jon about the warning being primarily a security issue of some kind. I discovered recently that Chrome has a security feature where auto-playing videos are halted if the user has not clicked on the page prior to that point or the videos are muted. However, this shouldn’t affect Pavlovia as they have to click “OK” to start the experiment, which should count.

I see - yeah, I was wondering how we got sent back to the ‘experiment initializing’ page and why favicon was involved.

As for the AudioContext warnings, the user had already pressed a number of keys on the keyboard (to advance through items) by the point this happened, in addition to clicking ‘Ok’ to start! Mysterious.

@jonathan.kominsky

The fact that it freezes after some number of items, and that it’s not consistent, could suggest either a memory issue or an issue with a specific audio file. Does this problem arise on a specific trial or when a specific sound is supposed to play?

No, it doesn’t arise on a specific trial or a specific sound - rather, I think you’re right about this being related to memory, specifically, due to how I’m presenting image stims in various routines. I described my issue in more detail, including the fixes I’ve tried, here (Online frame refresh rate? frame-based coordinate updates for images are jittery online), but basically I think image stims that are being updated for position and size on every frame in some routines are too memory intensive. I made some changes (moving trials that didn’t need those animations to new routines with constant positions and sizes for those image stims, resizing the pixel resolution of my image files), which helped stop memory-based crashes for a different piloter (using a different laptop/browser combo).
However, these don’t seem to have done much except slightly delay the point at which these errors show up for the original piloter.

Do you think it is mostly a memory issue, or might there be a specific browser security issue interacting with it? (If it’s the latter, I’m wondering whether there’s a specific security setting on Chrome (for Windows) that I can direct participants to change.)

Thanks again.