iOS client instantly crashing with large attachments

Mutual Help
1

Delta Chat version
1.46

Expected behavior

App is working correctly

Actual behavior
iOS app instantly crashes after showing splash screen for a while. Problem can solve by itself after indefinite amount of time (from 10 minutes to 24-36 hours)

Steps to reproduce the problem
0. (To break sender’s side) Enable sending copy to yourself

  1. Send a large video attachment from an Android app via postfix+dovecot server to user at the same server
  2. Open recipient’s iOS app — it crashes
  3. Open sender’s iOS app — it crashes

But it isn’t reproducible every time for both sides: sometimes both clients are broken, sometimes one of the them, sometimes both work correctly.

No logs could be retrieved, because app does not open. Nothing suspicious in the dovecot logs have seen.

1 Like
2

I made an issue for it on the iOS repo: iOS client instantly crashing with large attachments · Issue #2210 · deltachat/deltachat-ios · GitHub

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3

thanks a lot for your report! to make it easier to sort things out, maybe you can clarify the following points:

which size were you using got a “large video” - how many MB or even GB?

for 3. the “sender’s iOS app” - in 1. the sender was Android app. might be, of course, that Android is affected as well.

in general, for sure, we need some upper borders - in the past, core was restricting sizes, but that was removed completely, so we need some checking in the apps (eg. iOS has a very strict limit about the amount of memory an app can use - maybe this is just hit)

4

which size were you using got a “large video” - how many MB or even GB?

about 17 MB

for 3. the “sender’s iOS app” - in 1. the sender was Android app. might be, of course, that Android is affected as well.

The sender was an Android app, yes, but it does not crash

eg. iOS has a very strict limit about the amount of memory an app can use - maybe this is just hit

It may be the case, because more messages with large attachments in a series you send – more likely the problem will reproduce

BTW, at this postfix instance message_size_limit = 104857600

1 Like
5

hm, i tried to send myself several files/videos, but i could not reproduce the issue. the video was a raw size of 20mb, resulting in a message of about 30mb - which is the upper limit for the used email sever - larger files are denied to sent out.

@Simon as you created the issue in the iOS repo, i assume, you could reproduce that? if so, can you provide a log or give more information about how to reproduce and how “download on demand” is related to that?

otherwise, maybe the crash is not related to file size, but to actual file content, @JoeMcNuggets can you send the video/file in question to Message privately on Delta Chat

1 Like
6

Haven’t tried it, just reposted it there, because I didn’t know how actively you were watching the forum, it’s a bug report, not a feature request, so it belongs to iOS issue tracker.

7

I believe a friend of mine is suffering from this issue. DC on iOS (Appstore version) not opening after I sent him a 5 MB GIF from my DC Windows client. No issues viewing the chat, message and attachment on my testflight version. He is on Chatmail, I’m on vanilla Dovecot.

8

Well, I cannot reproduce crashes anymore, but now it instead of crashing app is hanging in the “Updating” state for a long time.

The strangest think is here: I’ve sent the message with a big (~18mb) attachment at 22:15. Recipient had no push notification and hang with “Updating” header. And there are no records regarding that time period at all. Recipient got the message at 23:28

image
image591×1280 142 KB

image
image591×1280 110 KB

Unfortunately I cannot provide you that file, but here’s it’s characteristics:

Input #0, gif, from '/home/art/Загрузки/that.gif':
  Duration: 00:00:06.36, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 23836 kb/s
  Stream #0:0: Video: gif, bgra, 640x360, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 100 tbn

Also I tried to provoke that behaviour with that gif on the another iOS device with another recipient and couldn’t reproduce, event after sending tens of them.

9

Аналогичная проблема. После отправки клиенту на иос большого файла, приложение не открывается. Висит на логотипе. Был отправлен лог файл, текстовый (name.log) около 30мб.

1 Like
10

Reproduced againt with a 13 mbytes video. Latest iOS client stucked in updating, can send messages, but can’t receive any.

Logs are the same as I provided earlier

Also, expunging the message with video attachment from recipient’s mailbox at Dovecot fixes the issue.