I have an experiment that contains two mp3 files of roughly 15 minutes each, one 6 MB and another 16 MB. If I try to run the experiment with either one individually, it works fine, but if I add a branch that directs the participant to either the experimental or the control group, I get an "Internet timeout error. Files pending: 1". A few seconds later the program crashes entirely. Occasionally it does manage to run, even when I've made no changes to the script.
However, after I closed about a dozen browser tabs and open programs, it does work consistently. This freed up about 1 GB of memory, going from 2 to 3 GB available. It seems that if there's not enough memory available, Inquisit crashes, but I'm not sure about that, because when I run the experiment, memory usage goes up by 1 GB at most. But given that I had no problems loading either the 6 MB or the 16 MB audio file alone, that suggests that trying to load them both into memory is what's causing problems. So what's actually going on here?
The script is a modified version of a task from the Inquisit library. A test version that only plays a few seconds of the audio is running at
https://mili2nd.eu/ln2b and the script is attached.