show error message when loading files that are too big

[kjhollen]

Nature of issue?

• Found a bug
• Existing feature enhancement
• New feature request

Most appropriate sub-area of p5.js?

• Color
• Core/Environment/Rendering
• Data
• Events
• Image
• IO
• Math
• Typography
• Utilities
• WebGL
• Other (specify if possible)

Feature enhancement details:

There are currently two open issues for when the browser fails to load a file because it is too big: #2661 for loadStrings() and #2216 for loadTable(). I think they are not possible to fix, but it would be good to produce an error message for the user and suggest breaking the data into smaller files as a work around.

New feature details:

[TanviKumar]

Taking this up as part of GSoC

[lmccart]

hi @TanviKumar what's the status on this one?

[TanviKumar]

Hey Lauren, the limit for loading large files was found as 64MB on previous versions of Firefox, so the goal now is to identify when to show an error stating that the file size is too large. Also planning to add this to the documentation of the loading methods so the users are aware.

[TanviKumar]

Hi @kjhollen, in order to limit the user from the loading very large files (in this case anything greater than 64MB in size), I plan on using the HEAD request to obtain the content length of the file without fetching the entire body. Would it be wise to use synchronous XHR or Async XHR? Here's a link to what I've been referring to.

[limzykenneth]

I think async will be better just so that if the server somehow has long latency it will not block the whole js thread causing the user's sketch to stop.