How to get around memory error with karma & phantomjs - 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.

Answer 2

We ran into similar issue. Your approach is interesting and certainly side steps the issue. However, be prepared to face it again later.
I've done some investigation and found the cause of memory growth (at least in our case). Turns out when you use:
beforeEach(inject(SomeActualService)){ .... }
the memory taken up by SomeActualService does not get released at the end of the describe block and if you have multiple test files where you inject the same service (or other injectable objects) more memory will be allocated for it again.
I have a couple of ideas on how to avoid this:
1. create mock objects and never use inject to get real objects unless you are in the test that tests that module. This will require writing tons of extra code.
2. Create your own tracker (for tests only) for injectable objects. That way they can be loaded only once and reused between test files.
Forgot to mention: We are using angular 1.3.2, Jasmine 2.0 and hit this problem around 1000 tests.

Answer 3

I was also running into this issue after about 1037 tests on Windows 10 with PhantomJS 1.9.18.
It would appear as ERROR [launcher]: PhantomJS crashed. after the RAM for the process would exceed about 800-850 MB.
There appears to be a temporary fix here:
https://github.com/gskachkov/karma-phantomjs2-launcher
https://www.npmjs.com/package/karma-phantomjs2-launcher
You install it via npm install karma-phantomjs2-launcher --save-dev
But then need to use it in karma.conf.js via
config.set({
browsers: ['PhantomJS2'],
...
});
This seems to run the same set of tests while only using between 250-550 MB RAM and without crashing.
Note that this fix works out of the box on Windows and OS X, but not Linux (PhantomJS2 binaries won't start). This affects pushes to Travis CI.
To work around this issue on Debian/Ubuntu:
sudo apt-get install libicu52 libjpeg8 libfontconfig libwebp5

Answer 4

This is a problem with PhantomJS. According to another source, PhantomJS only runs the garbage collector when the page is closed, and this only happens after your tests run. Other browsers work fine because their garbage collectors work as expected.
After spending a few days on the issue, we concluded that the best solution was to split tests into groups. We had grunt create a profile for each directory dynamically and created a command that runs all those profiles. For all intents and purposes, it works just the same.

Answer 5

We had a similar issue on linux (ubuntu), that turned out to be the amount of memory segments that the process can manage:
$ cat /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count
65530
Then run this:
$ sudo bash -c 'echo 6553000 > /proc/sys/vm/max_map_count'
Note the number was multiplied by 100.
This will change the session settings. If it solves the problem, you can set it up for all future sessions:
$ sudo bash -c 'echo vm.max_map_count = 6553000 > /etc/sysctl.d/60-max_map_count.conf'

Answer 6

Responding to an old question, but hopefully this helps ...
I have a build process which a CI job runs in a command line only linux box. So, it seems that PhantomJS is my only option there. I have experienced this memory issue locally on my mac, but somehow it doesn't happen on the linux box. My solution was to add another test command to my package.json to run karma using Chrome, and run that locally to run my tests. When pushed up, Jenkins would kick off the regular test command, running PhantomJS.
Install this plugin: https://github.com/karma-runner/karma-chrome-launcher
Add this to package.json
"test": "karma start",
"test:chrome": "karma start --browsers Chrome"