Hi folks,
We’re running some private instances. After running tests for a few days, we have hundreds of Flash processes sitting around. I assume these get leaked from some test. I thought that WPT had some kind of process killer to avoid this. Perhaps I have it misconfigured? Can someone point me to the relevant code, docs, or config?
Thanks,
Adam
WPTdriver is supposed to reboot the computer from time to time, precisely to prevent such things to happen.
I’m not sure if this is still the case though, so personally I configured my agents to reboot every 12 hours
Patrick took that functionality out of WPTdriver back in 2013
good to know
Anyway, as said I configured the OS itself to reboot frequently, that should solve adamcath problem
It should kill any child processes that are spawned by the browser but it’s possible that something with the flash processes is going down a different path. Adding a pre and post-test pass that kills well-known processes would be trivial. Is it flash.exe or what is the actual process(es) running?
As far as rebooting goes, I usually run my agents without rebooting and they’re usually good for months without having any issues though Windows Update is set on automatic and is usually good for rebooting them every few weeks anyway.
Pat, here’s a screenshot of what is happening on our agent. For reference, this problem only appears when running a test in firefox:
We are currently running windows Server 2012.
The name of the process in question is FlashPlayerPlugin_17_0_0_169.exe
Hey guys, so we figured out the problem(somewhat). Beacuse we are running on Windows Server 2012, things are a bit locked down. When we start a test in frefox, flash would run in what’s called protected mode(http://blogs.adobe.com/security/2012/06/inside-flash-player-protected-mode-for-firefox.html). However, because of our locked down security, some access permission would fail and cause it to crash. That was what was causing all the extraneous flash processes.
The solution:
Simply disable flash protected mode. This can be done easily by adding the following line to firefox’s prefs.js file:
user_pref(“dom.ipc.plugins.flash.disable-protected-mode”, true);
Problem solved 