[rspec-users] (Bad) Memory Leak in RSpec 2

[David Chelimsky]

On Feb 14, 2011, at 7:08 PM, Kane Baccigalupi wrote:

> We have had a really great integrated javascripting testing in our very
> large, very javascripty Sinatra application. Our testing setup uses a
> custom version of harmony (http://github.com/baccigalupi/harmony), that
> reduces the out of control memory we were seeing in the original gem.
> The trade off has been performance, but it has been worth it since
> harmony without these modifications get above 2G of memory consumption.
> That was bringing our development box to its knees. The custom version
> of harmony creates individual window objects with each request which can
> then be garbage collected at the end of usage. It worked great in rspec
> 1.x. Here was our setup:
> 
> describe 'some javascript class' do
>  before :all do
>    @dom = Harmony::Page.new(my_ruby_view)
>    @dom.load(some_js_files)
>  end
> 
>  it 'should do something' do
>    @dom.execute_js('javascript here').should == what_we_expect
>  end
> end
> 
> We are upgrading to RSpec 2, which has been a lot more involved and
> undocumented than we had hoped.

Please let me know what is not yet documented on the following pages:

http://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-core/v/2-5/file/upgrade
http://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-expectations/v/2-5/file/upgrade
http://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-mocks/v/2-5/file/upgrade
http://relishapp.com/rspec/rspec-rails/v/2-5/file/upgrade

> Our biggest issue though is that the memory reduction measures that we
> added to the harmony gem are no longer working. Presumably this is
> because RSpec 2 is hanging on to the variables somewhere that we cannot
> find. Setting our harmony Page objects to nil is not working:
> 
>  # in the spec_helper Rspec.configure block:
>  config.after(:all) do
>    puts 'about to cleanup'
>    @dom = nil
>    GC.start # trying to cleanup via Ruby
>    puts Johnson.evaluate <<-JS
>      Johnson.runtime.gc(); // trying to cleanup via JS
>    JS
>  end
> 
> We have tried a lot of ordering combinations in our garbage collection
> to see if anything will work, but instead the memory is climbing out of
> control with each suite. In version RSpec 1.x we didn't have to do any
> manual garbage collection.

Nor should you have to. Can you use after(:each) instead of after all?

  config.after(:each) { @dom = nil }