Crash every time at startup with 'Code 5'

[martijnburger]

Does this issue occur when all extensions are disabled?: Yes

• VS Code Version: 1.78.2
• OS Version: macOS Ventura 13.4 (Apple M1 Pro)

Steps to Reproduce:

1. Startup VSCode in any way.
2. There are two windows opening, a second window is always opened with the text The editor could not be opened because the file was not found.
3. A few seconds later the window crashes with: The window terminated unexpectedly (reason: 'crashed', code: '5')
4. On the second window you can still continue working.

Something along the same lines was also reported in this and users reported that they saw the same issue after the OP reported not seeing the problem anymore.

Copy of closed:
#180916

Attached find the crash report
vscode-crash.zip

[martijnburger]

Up!

[Marshall-L-D]

This is happening to me on Mac Ventura 13.4.1 with VS Code:
Version: 1.80.2
Commit: 2ccd690
Date: 2023-07-27T21:05:41.366Z
Electron: 22.3.14
ElectronBuildId: 22695494
Chromium: 108.0.5359.215
Node.js: 16.17.1
V8: 10.8.168.25-electron.0
OS: Darwin x64 22.5.0

I attempted to open a large file several days ago. That caused a crash. I closed VS Code and now each time I open VS Code I get the crash with reason code 5. It keeps attempting to load the large file on open. I have the setting "Restore Windows" set to none and always have. The large file no longer exists on my system and still it seems to be attempting to load it on every restart.

[martijnburger]

Great addition @Marshall-L-D . This is exactly how the issue started on my side too. Let's hope for a quick response from Microsoft.

[Marshall-L-D]

Got tired of waiting on a fix and since every day my VSCODE startup would attempt to load this old 1.46GB file and crash. I started looking around. Finally found where VSCODE stores its temporary data on Mac, ~/Library/Application Support/Code/.

There was a directory "Backups" containing a numbered directory with a 1.46GB file. I deleted that subdirectory and contents under ~/Library/Application Support/code/Backups/. Now my VSCODE comes up cleanly, no crash.

I hope this helps others who run into this issue.

[deepak1556]

the workbench process crash due to out of memory when performing TextDecoder.decode(), @rebornix I am not sure how textdecoding kicks in when opening a file, are we processing the entire file into memory for decoding which might explain the memory cap ?

@martijnburger can you provide a minimal repro to help us debug this issue further, thanks!

[martijnburger]

1. Open a file that is too large for VS Code with that memory allocation.
2. Let VS Code open with more memory allocation.
3. Let it crash because it is still to large.
4. Do this on a Apple Silicon Mac.
5. It will crash everytime at startup looking for this file.

[martijnburger]

@deepak1556 What is going to happen now?

[deepak1556]

The issue should be fixed once #167719 gets addressed. We cannot increase the memory cap for the process due to a limitation from the runtime, so a workaround until then would be to use our remote tunnels feature https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/remote/tunnels for viewing the affected files.