PhantomJS process keeps running in background after calling program.kill() - selenium

Question

I'm using phantomjs and webdriverio to fetch and render a webpage that's loaded by javascript, then save it to be parsed later by cheerio.
Here's the code for that:
import phantomjs from 'phantomjs-prebuilt'
const webdriverio = require('webdriverio')
const wdOpts = {
desiredCapabilities: {
browserName: 'phantomjs'
}
}
async parse (parseUrl) {
return phantomjs.run('--webdriver=4444').then(program => {
return webdriverio.remote(wdOpts)
.init()
.url(parseUrl)
.waitForExist('.main-ios', 100000)
.pause(5000)
.getHTML('html', true)
.then((html) => {
program.kill()
return html
})
})
}
Even though I call program.kill() I notice that the phantomjs in the list of processes, and it does use up quite a bit of RAM and CPU.
I'm wondering why the process doesn't terminate.

Answer 1

.close() just closes the window. There is a known bug, if it is the last window it stays open.
.quit() should do it, but there are issues associated with that as well.
PhantomJS bug report: https://github.com/detro/ghostdriver/issues/162
someone has a decent workaround posted at the bottom of that thread:
https://github.com/SeleniumHQ/selenium/issues/767#issuecomment-140367536
this fix shoots a SIGTERM to end it: (In python, but might be usefull)
# assume browser = webdriver.PhantomJS()
browser.service.process.send_signal(signal.SIGTERM)
browser.quit()
I like to just open a Docker container with my automation, and run it in there. Docker closes it up for me, however that is prolly out of scope for what you want to do.. i would recommend the above SIGTERM+quit method.

Answer 2

PhantomJS is a 2 component product. There is the Javascript which runs on the client (Whether web or other Script) side as part of your code. Then there is the part that runs as a server-side application (The command line call)
It has been my experience with PhantomJS that when an error is encountered, the PHantomJS server side "hangs" but is unresponsive. If you can update your call to this script to provide output logging, you may b able to see what the error is that PhantomJS application is encountering.
phantomjs /path/to/script/ > /path/to/log/file 2>&1
Hope this Helps! If you'd like me to clarify anything, or elaborate I'm happy to update my answer, just let me know in a comment, Thanks!