"Failed to load resource: The request timed out" loop causes simple-bar flickering

[Gelio]

Describe the bug

From time to time, the simple-bar starts flickering, and it looks like it is restarting itself very often. In the ubersicht debug console I do see a bunch of Failed to load resource: The request timed out. errors intertwined with Error in index.jsx: Error: error running command

This really slows down my M1 Mac Pro to the points that the fans turn on.

Restarting the widget, restarting ubersicht does not help.

To Reproduce

Unfortunately, I don't know what causes this problem and how to reliably reproduce it.

It usually works fine for a couple of days, and then starts having these problems for 5 minutes and then the problems repeat every 2-3 hours.

I have had this problem for a couple of months now, and it survives despite macOS upgrades.

Expected behavior

No error logs in the debug console. No

Screenshots

Information (please complete the following information):

• OS version: macOS Sequoia 15.7.3
• yabai v7.1.16
• Übersicht version 1.6 (82)

Additional context

The error could be coming from this wrapError line in client.js, but I don't know, it's difficult to analyze this stack trace:

[Jean-Tinland]

It is possible that one of the data widget is causing this but it is indeed a bit difficult to find a useful stack trace. You can try to disable all data widgets except one and see which one is causing this?

[Gelio]

Right, thanks for the tip. The interesting part is that I only have the Process Name widget enabled

Are you saying that I should disable it and see if that helps, to diagnose whether the problem is with this one Process Name widget, or with the "core" of simple-bar (like getting space numbers/labels)?

Perhaps there is some more debugging logs we could add to make it easier to debug?

[Gelio]

I've read some more code and I'm pretty sure that the error I see in the console is coming from Ubersicht having a problem running simple-bar's command:

https://github.com/felixhageloh/uebersicht/blob/859a7d70525949b8bdeec19d69a4766678ca3527/server/src/runShellCommand.js#L4

In my case, it is running https://github.com/Jean-Tinland/simple-bar/blob/master/lib/scripts/init-yabai.sh

The only thing I am missing now is the error message from that script.

As far as I understand, when an error in the command happens (https://github.com/felixhageloh/uebersicht/blob/859a7d70525949b8bdeec19d69a4766678ca3527/server/src/command_server.coffee#L27-L29), then the error message is included in the response to the /run API request, but that message is never printed to the console in https://github.com/felixhageloh/uebersicht/blob/859a7d70525949b8bdeec19d69a4766678ca3527/server/src/runShellCommand.js#L4

When I see simple-bar flickering again, I will try to run the init-yabai.sh script manually and see what it prints. Maybe this way I can get the actual error message.

As for the "The request timed out" messages, I suppose they come from the .timeout() call in https://github.com/felixhageloh/uebersicht/blob/859a7d70525949b8bdeec19d69a4766678ca3527/server/src/runCommand.js#L11

After some more debugging, I found out that superagent@3.8.3 (which is what Ubersicht is using, very old) expects timeouts to be numbers that are greater than 0: https://github.com/forwardemail/superagent/blob/v3.8.3/docs/index.md#timeouts (at least according to the documentation).

Ubersicht uses the widget's refreshFrequency as the timeout. For simple-bar, it's false. Maybe it's coerced to 0ms? Not sure, need to debug more.

When the flickering happens, running init-yabai.sh works fine, there is no error in the script. I suppose that it just simply exceeds some super-low timeout, and that's why Ubersicht says that it fails.

[Gelio]

I am taking a pause in the debugging process. It seems to me that the problem is somewhere in the Ubersicht client -> server communication, when the requests time out. I can't say why they time out. I've noticed that sometimes the requests are fast (<100 ms), and sometimes they are in the order of seconds (like 15s), and when then time out, it's closer to 1 minute.

<100 ms:

15s:

Timeouts, closer to 1 minute:

I'll try to send curl commands to simulate these network requests when I see simple-bar flicker again.

That said, it does not look like a problem with any particular widget, but with the command (init-yabai.sh script) that simple-bar uses, or with Ubersicht not being able to execute it.

[Gelio]

I was not able to track it down, unfortunately. I decided to switch away from ubersicht + simple-bar to https://github.com/FelixKratz/SketchyBar

[Jean-Tinland]

Hi again, I understand! I have trouble solving some issues as they seems "machine related": I miss the platform allowing for correct reproduction of this type of bug.

Hope SketchyBar suits you well! It is a really nice piece of standalone software! Have fun!

Edit: and most of all, thank you for your time trying to find the root cause of this bug.

[Gelio]

Thanks for your understanding and kind words!

I will leave it up to you whether to keep this issue open or not. My slight preference would be to keep it open for visibility in case someone else also encounters this problem.