What to do on TransactionTooLargeException

Question

I encountered this issue, and I found that when there huge amount of data getting exchanged between a service and an application,(This involves transferring lots of thumbnails). Actually data size was around 500kb, and the IPC transaction buffer size is set to 1024KB. I am not sure why it exceeded the transaction buffer.

This also can occur, when you pass lot of data through intent extras

When you get this exception in your application, please analyze your code.

1. Are you exchanging lot of data between your services and application?
2. Using intents to share huge data, (for example, the user selects huge number of files from gallery share press share, the URIs of the selected files will be transferred using intents)
3. receiving bitmap files from service
4. waiting for android to respond back with huge data (for example, getInstalledApplications() when the user installed lot of applications)
5. using applyBatch() with lot of operations pending

How to handle when you get this exception

If possible, split the big operation in to small chunks, for example, instead of calling applyBatch() with 1000 operations, call it with 100 each.

Do not exchange huge data (>1MB) between services and application

I dont know how to do this, but, Do not query android, which can return huge data :-)

If you need to investigate which Parcel is causing your crash, you should consider trying TooLargeTool.

(I found this as a comment from @Max Spencer under the accepted answer and it was helpful in my case.)

This is not a definitive answer, but it may shed some light on the causes of a TransactionTooLargeException and help pinpoint the problem.

Although most answers refer to large amounts of data transferred, I see this exception being thrown incidentally after heavy scrolling and zooming and repeatedly opening an ActionBar spinner menu. The crash happens on tapping the action bar. (this is a custom mapping app)

The only data being passed around seem to be touches from the "Input Dispatcher" to the app. I think this cannot reasonably amount to anywhere near 1 mb in the "Transaction Buffer".

My app is running on a quad core 1.6 GHz device and uses 3 threads for heavylifting, keeping one core free for the UI thread. Furthermore, the app uses android:largeHeap, has 10 mb of unused heap left and has 100 mb of room left to grow the heap. So I wouldn't say it is a resource issue.

The crash is always immediately preceded by these lines:

W/InputDispatcher( 2271): channel ~ Consumer closed input channel or an error occurred.  events=0x9
E/InputDispatcher( 2271): channel ~ Channel is unrecoverably broken and will be disposed!
E/JavaBinder(28182): !!! FAILED BINDER TRANSACTION !!!

Which are not neccesarily printed in that order, but (as far as I checked) happen on the same millisecond.

And the stack trace itself, for clarity, is the same as in the question:

E/AndroidRuntime(28182): java.lang.RuntimeException: Adding window failed
..
E/AndroidRuntime(28182): Caused by: android.os.TransactionTooLargeException

Delving into the source code of android one finds these lines:

frameworks/base/core/jni/android_util_Binder.cpp:

case FAILED_TRANSACTION:
    ALOGE("!!! FAILED BINDER TRANSACTION !!!");
    // TransactionTooLargeException is a checked exception, only throw from certain methods.
    // FIXME: Transaction too large is the most common reason for FAILED_TRANSACTION
    //        but it is not the only one.  The Binder driver can return BR_FAILED_REPLY
    //        for other reasons also, such as if the transaction is malformed or
    //        refers to an FD that has been closed.  We should change the driver
    //        to enable us to distinguish these cases in the future.
    jniThrowException(env, canThrowRemoteException
            ? "android/os/TransactionTooLargeException"
                    : "java/lang/RuntimeException", NULL);

To me it sounds like I'm possibly hitting this undocumented feature, where the transaction fails for other reasons than a Transaction being TooLarge. They should have named it TransactionTooLargeOrAnotherReasonException.

At this time I did not solve the issue, but if I find something useful I will update this answer.

update: it turned out my code leaked some file descriptors, the number of which is maximized in linux (typically 1024), and this seems to have triggered the exception. So it was a resource issue after all. I verified this by opening /dev/zero 1024 times, which resulted in all kinds of weird exceptions in UI related actions, including the exception above, and even some SIGSEGV's. Apparently failure to open a file/socket is not something which is handled/reported very cleanly throughout Android.

The TransactionTooLargeException has been plaguing us for about 4 months now, and we've finally resolved the issue!

What was happening was we are using a FragmentStatePagerAdapter in a ViewPager. The user would page through and create 100+ fragments (its a reading application).

Although we manage the fragments properly in destroyItem(), in Androids implementation of FragmentStatePagerAdapter there is a bug, where it kept a reference to the following list:

private ArrayList<Fragment.SavedState> mSavedState = new ArrayList<Fragment.SavedState>();

And when the Android's FragmentStatePagerAdapter attempts to save the state, it will call the function

@Override
public Parcelable saveState() {
    Bundle state = null;
    if (mSavedState.size() > 0) {
        state = new Bundle();
        Fragment.SavedState[] fss = new Fragment.SavedState[mSavedState.size()];
        mSavedState.toArray(fss);
        state.putParcelableArray("states", fss);
    }
    for (int i=0; i<mFragments.size(); i++) {
        Fragment f = mFragments.get(i);
        if (f != null && f.isAdded()) {
            if (state == null) {
                state = new Bundle();
            }
            String key = "f" + i;
            mFragmentManager.putFragment(state, key, f);
        }
    }
    return state;
}

As you can see, even if you properly manage the fragments in the FragmentStatePagerAdapter subclass, the base class will still store an Fragment.SavedState for every single fragment ever created. The TransactionTooLargeException would occur when that array was dumped to a parcelableArray and the OS wouldn't like it 100+ items.

Therefore the fix for us was to override the saveState() method and not store anything for "states".

@Override
public Parcelable saveState() {
    Bundle bundle = (Bundle) super.saveState();
    bundle.putParcelableArray("states", null); // Never maintain any states from the base class, just null it out
    return bundle;
}

For those who bitterly disappointed in search of answer of why the TransactionTooLargeException apears, try to check how much information you save in instance state.

On compile/targetSdkVersion <= 23 we have only internal warning about large size of saved state, but nothing is crashed:

E/ActivityThread: App sent too much data in instance state, so it was ignored
    android.os.TransactionTooLargeException: data parcel size 713856 bytes
    at android.os.BinderProxy.transactNative(Native Method)
    at android.os.BinderProxy.transact(Binder.java:615)
    at android.app.ActivityManagerProxy.activityStopped(ActivityManagerNative.java:3604)
    at android.app.ActivityThread$StopInfo.run(ActivityThread.java:3729)
    at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:751)
    at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:95)
    at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:154)
    at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:6044)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
    at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:865)
    at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:755)

But on compile/targetSdkVersion >= 24 we have real RuntimeException crash in this case:

java.lang.RuntimeException: android.os.TransactionTooLargeException: data parcel size 713860 bytes
    at android.app.ActivityThread$StopInfo.run(ActivityThread.java:3737)
    at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:751)
    at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:95)
    at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:154)
    at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:6044)
    at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method)
    at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:865)
    at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:755)
 Caused by: android.os.TransactionTooLargeException: data parcel size 713860 bytes
   at android.os.BinderProxy.transactNative(Native Method)
   at android.os.BinderProxy.transact(Binder.java:615)
   at android.app.ActivityManagerProxy.activityStopped(ActivityManagerNative.java:3604)
   at android.app.ActivityThread$StopInfo.run(ActivityThread.java:3729)
   at android.os.Handler.handleCallback(Handler.java:751) 
   at android.os.Handler.dispatchMessage(Handler.java:95) 
   at android.os.Looper.loop(Looper.java:154) 
   at android.app.ActivityThread.main(ActivityThread.java:6044) 
   at java.lang.reflect.Method.invoke(Native Method) 
   at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit$MethodAndArgsCaller.run(ZygoteInit.java:865) 
   at com.android.internal.os.ZygoteInit.main(ZygoteInit.java:755) 

What to do?

Save data in local database and keep only id's in instance state which you can use to retrieve this data.

This exception is typically thrown when the app is being sent to the background.

So I've decided to use the data Fragment method to completely circumvent the onSavedInstanceStae lifecycle. My solution also handles complex instance states and frees memory ASAP.

First I've created a simple Fargment to store the data:

package info.peakapps.peaksdk.logic;
import android.app.Fragment;
import android.app.FragmentManager;
import android.os.Bundle;

/**
 * A neat trick to avoid TransactionTooLargeException while saving our instance state
 */

public class SavedInstanceFragment extends Fragment {

    private static final String TAG = "SavedInstanceFragment";
    private Bundle mInstanceBundle = null;

    public SavedInstanceFragment() { // This will only be called once be cause of setRetainInstance()
        super();
        setRetainInstance( true );
    }

    public SavedInstanceFragment pushData( Bundle instanceState )
    {
        if ( this.mInstanceBundle == null ) {
            this.mInstanceBundle = instanceState;
        }
        else
        {
            this.mInstanceBundle.putAll( instanceState );
        }
        return this;
    }

    public Bundle popData()
    {
        Bundle out = this.mInstanceBundle;
        this.mInstanceBundle = null;
        return out;
    }

    public static final SavedInstanceFragment getInstance(FragmentManager fragmentManager )
    {
        SavedInstanceFragment out = (SavedInstanceFragment) fragmentManager.findFragmentByTag( TAG );

        if ( out == null )
        {
            out = new SavedInstanceFragment();
            fragmentManager.beginTransaction().add( out, TAG ).commit();
        }
        return out;
    }
}

Then on my main Activity I circumvent the saved instance cycle completely, and defer the respoinsibilty to my data Fragment. No need to use this on the Fragments themselves, sice their state is added to the Activity's state automatically):

@Override
protected void onSaveInstanceState(Bundle outState) {
    super.onSaveInstanceState(outState);

    SavedInstanceFragment.getInstance( getFragmentManager() ).pushData( (Bundle) outState.clone() );
    outState.clear(); // We don't want a TransactionTooLargeException, so we handle things via the SavedInstanceFragment
}

What's left is simply to pop the saved instance:

@Override
protected void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onCreate(SavedInstanceFragment.getInstance(getFragmentManager()).popData());
}

@Override
protected void onRestoreInstanceState(Bundle savedInstanceState) {
    super.onRestoreInstanceState( SavedInstanceFragment.getInstance( getFragmentManager() ).popData() );
}

Full details: http://www.devsbedevin.net/avoiding-transactiontoolargeexception-on-android-nougat-and-up/