How Facebook Is Trying to Reduce iOS App Crashes

What is a FOOM, and how is Facebook trying to eliminate them from its flagship iOS application?

What is a FOOM, and how is Facebook trying to eliminate them from its flagship iOS application?

Software engineers Ali Ansari and Grzegorz Pstrucha described the social network’s efforts to reduce instances of OOMs, FOOMs and BOOMs—out-of-memory events, foreground OOMs and background OOMs—from the Facebook iOS app in an engineering blog post.

According to Ansari and Pstrucha, OOMs occur when iOS devices are running low on memory, causing iOS to shut down the app in order to reclaim memory and bringing users to devices’ home screens without warning.

The software engineers said they listed all of the known reasons why the app could terminate, starting with the question, “What can cause the app to start up?” This enabled them to figure out when OOMs occurred and break those OOMs down into FOOMs and BOOMs.

WhyIsTheAppStarting

They wrote:

The logging showed that there was a higher rate of OOMs on devices with less memory, which was expected...

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