V8 OOM crash → white screen after extended sessions (Linux) #1686
Description
Description
T3 Code (Alpha) desktop app on Linux freezes and goes to a white screen during extended sessions. The window frame stays alive but the renderer is dead.
Root Cause (from logs)
The Electron renderer process hits V8's heap limit (~3.7 GB) and crashes with OOM:
[585758:0x1144004e0000] Mark-Compact (reduce) 3746.0 (4003.8) -> 3746.0 (4002.8) MB, pooled: 0.0 MB, 540.68 / 0.00 ms (average mu = 0.058, current mu = 0.000) last resort; GC in old space requested
V8 javascript OOM (Ineffective mark-compacts near heap limit).
Process 585758 (t3-code-desktop) dumped core.
Consumed 3h 22min 35.026s CPU time over 1h 6min 45.825s wall clock time, 22.3G memory peak, 448.4M memory swap peak.
V8 GC runs "last resort" compaction twice but reclaims 0 bytes — the entire 3.7 GB heap is live/reachable.
Reproduction
- Open T3 Code desktop on Linux
- Run an extended session (~1 hour) with heavy tool use (many Bash calls, large file reads, code diffs)
- App freezes, then goes to white screen
Happens intermittently but reproducibly on long sessions with large tool outputs.
Environment
- App: T3 Code (Alpha), installed from AUR (
t3code-bin) at/opt/t3code-bin/ - OS: CachyOS (Arch-based), Linux 6.19.10-1-cachyos, x86-64
- Memory: System has sufficient RAM; the issue is V8 heap exhaustion in the renderer process
Expected Behavior
The app should either:
- Evict old conversation turns from the renderer's DOM/React state to stay within heap limits
- Gracefully recover (reload the renderer) instead of showing a dead white screen
- Show an error message suggesting the user start a fresh conversation
Workaround
Using the CLI (claude) instead of the desktop app avoids the issue entirely since there's no Electron layer.
Log Locations
- Desktop main log:
~/.t3/userdata/logs/desktop-main.log - Server child log:
~/.t3/userdata/logs/server-child.log - Provider logs:
~/.t3/userdata/logs/provider/_global.log - Core dump: captured by
systemd-coredump