Eventual Freezing on Low RAM Hardware

[cndiv]

Hi All,

It's Chip from Wikimedia. I mentioned this to Stephen way back when but haven't gotten around to filing a bug until now - hoping you can help out with this.

I really love hatnote.com and want to set up some Raspberry Pis around the WMF offices as kiosks that display the site, but there's one problem. After a few hours of displaying hatnote, the small amount of RAM in the Pi (512MB) is filled, which crashes or freezes the browser. The only solution is to quit the browser or to restart the Pi entirely, which isn't really practical every few hours on machines with no keyboard/mouse connected.

I've watched the process happen quite a few times, and I've noticed that the updates happen slower around the 2000 mark, and freeze entirely around the 6000 mark.

Originally I was going to work around this issue by running a cron job to restart the Pi every few hours, but that's proving kind of a hassle as the machine is sometimes out of RAM before the job runs.

Could I ask you all to add a bit of code that refreshes the page after, say, 1500 updates? With that added I could run these kiosks indefinitely.

Let me know if you want to see this happen, I have a Pi set up in the server room.