How to get around memory error with karma & phantomjs

Question

We're running tests using karma and phantomjs Last week, our tests mysteriously started crashing phantomJS with an error of -1073741819.

Based on this thread for Chutzpah it appears that code indicates a native memory failure with PhantomJS.

Upon further investigation, we are consistently seeing phantom crash around 750MB of memory.

Is there a way to configure Karma so that it does not run up against this limit? Or a way to tell it to flush phantom?

We only have around 1200 tests so far. We're about 1/4 of the way through our project, so 5000 UI tests doesn't seem out of the question.

Answer 1

Thanks to the StackOverflow phenomenon of posting a question and quickly discovering an answer, we solved this by adding gulp tasks. Before we were just running karma start at the command line. This spun up a single instance of phantomjs that crashed when 750MB was reached.

Now we have a gulp command for each one of our sections of tests, e.g. gulp common-tests and gulp admin-tests and gulp customer-tests

Then a single gulp karma that runs each of those groupings. This allows each gulp command to have its own instance of phantom, and therefore stay underneath that threshold.