Phantomjs dies by high memory consumption
We are using phantomjs to run our qunit tests page on our TFS build server. Our version of test runner is built from below example
https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/blob/master/examples/run-qunit.js
Over a period of time number of tests increased from hundreds to couple of thousands and on a fine day phantomjs started crashing. It literally dies saying upload the dump and when you see the dump it 0kb !!
When we took a closer look at it on process explorer we found that memory consumption by phantomjs keeps going up as phantomjs is running tests and eventually crashes somewhere 833MB.
Yes the same amount of memory was being utilized by chrome and IE ! And Yes-Yes our tests were leaking memory :(. We did fixed it, memory utilization is lowered by 50% on chrome and IE and we expected phantomjs will handle it now. But no, phantomjs still kept crashing, process explorer shows same memory consumption.
http://phantomjs.org/api/webpage/method/close.html
According to above documentation phantomjs releases heap allocation just on close ? Could that be the reason why our fixed test consumed less memory on chrome but not phantomjs ? And last how to fix this ? How to make phantomjs keep garbage collecting javascript objects to reduce heap allocation ?
Update 1 - 07/28
We took a work around. I did modified my script to execute my tests module by module. In loop after executing all tests for a module I call page.close so it releases the memory for each module and never keeps building the dead heap of objects. Not closing this question since since its a workaround and not a solution. Hope creators will fix this sometime.
Answer
There is a static method, QWebPageSettings::clearMemoryCache, that invokes WebKit's garbage collection. However, it clears all QWebPage memory cache for every instantiated QWebPage object and is therefore, currently, unsuitable for including as an option in PhantomJS.
The Github pull request is available here:
https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/pull/11511
Here's the Google Groups discussion:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/phantomjs/wIDp9J7B-bE/v5U31_mTbswJ
Until a workaround is available, you might break up your unit tests into blocks on separate pages. It will take a change to QtWebkit's implementation and how memory/cache is handled across QWebPage objects.
Update September 2014:
https://github.com/ariya/phantomjs/commit/5768b705a0
It looks like support for clearing memory cache was added, but there is a note about my original comment in the commit.