Images do not show updated when changed on disk

[eByte23]

New description @bpasero
Depends on electron/electron#6275

Old

• VSCode Version: 1.2.1-1.3.0 latest
• OS Version: windows(test) most likely all

1- Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a folder with 5 or so large images in vscode
2. click between them quickly
3. vscode crashes

2- Steps to Reproduce:

1. Open a project in vscode
2. Enable tabs
3. Open some large files quickly and switch between them

[eByte23]

Will add further details later e.g. memory usage, dumps etc.. /cc @bpasero (If you want to track)

[bpasero]

@eByte23 how large are those images? can you attach the files you use?

[eByte23]

@bpasero I can't provide the images as the are client images probably copyrighted also.

But here are the sizes and types

[bpasero]

Thanks. And the files you open are all of the same file type and similar size?

[eByte23]

Just varying of all those types, it was happening switch between the biggest file in the list to others very quickly

[bpasero]

There are multiple issues:

• opening a large image adds quite some memory to the process
• closing the editor with that image does not release this memory for whatever reason
• we add a random number to the image path so that upon opening we bypass the browser cache and thus we add this memory each time you activate a tab

I do not have good solutions. If we disable the random number, we easily hit an issue where users would see stale images if they change meanwhile which can be frustrating.

The more interesting question is: Can we teach Chrome somehow to release the image resources? I have filed electron/electron#6275 against Electron to find out.

[bpasero]

Since this has been like that since day one, and my proposed solution using a webview is rather large, I am moving this to July to investigate further.

[bpasero]

I pushed a workaround for now to not add a random number to the image URL when showing the image. This has the benefit of keeping the memory pressure low because we avoid loading the same image over and over. It has the downside that the image will not show any changes if it has been updated. I plan to add an explicit refresh action to the image viewer so that you can still force it to repaint.

[bpasero]

Marking as upstream due to electron/electron#6275

[jaime-olivares]

In gulp there is a watch functionality for sensing changes in the source code for a given folder/glob (usually for recompiling). Can we use the same technique for updating the cached images?

[bpasero]

Verify: images changed outside are reloading in VS Code (both for when the image is active in a tab as well as if inactive and you make it active).

[demus]

this is still happening to me