[selenium] release Selenium chromedriver.exe from memory

I set up a python code to run Selenium chromedriver.exe. At the end of the run I have browser.close() to close the instance. (browser = webdriver.Chrome()) I believe it should release chromedriver.exe from memory (I'm on Windows 7). However after each run there is one chromedriver.exe instance remain in the memory. I hope there is a way I can write something in python to kill the chromedriver.exe process. Obviously browser.close() doesn't do the work. Thanks.

Observed on version 3.141.0:

If you initialize your ChromeDriver with just ChromeOptions, quit() will not close out chromedriver.exe.

    ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
    ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(chromeOptions);
    // .. do stuff ..
    driver.quit()

If you create and pass in a ChromeDriverService, quit() will close chromedriver.exe out correctly.

    ChromeDriverService driverService = ChromeDriverService.CreateDefaultService();
    ChromeOptions chromeOptions = new ChromeOptions();
    ChromeDriver driver = new ChromeDriver(driverService, chromeOptions);
    // .. do stuff ..
    driver.quit()

Kill Multiple Processes From the Command Line The first thing you’ll need to do is open up a command prompt, and then use the taskkill command with the following syntax:

taskkill /F /IM <processname.exe> /T

These parameters will forcibly kill any process matching the name of the executable that you specify. For instance, to kill all iexplore.exe processes, we’d use:

taskkill /F /IM iexplore.exe

This answer is how to properly dispose of the driver in C#

If you want to use a 'proper' mechanism that should be used to 'tidy up' after running ChromeDriver you should use IWebDriver.Dispose();

Performs application-defined tasks associated with freeing, releasing, or resetting unmanaged resources. (Inherited from IDisposable.)

I usually implement IDisposable on class that is dealing with IWebDriver

public class WebDriverController : IDisposable
{
    public IWebDriver Driver;

    public void Dispose()
    {
        this.Driver.Dispose();
    }
}

and use it like:

using (var controller = new WebDriverController())
{
  //code goes here
}

Hope this saves you some time

I came here initially thinking surely this would have been answered/resolved but after reading all the answers I was a bit surprised no one tried to call all three methods together:

try
{
    blah
}
catch
{
    blah
}
finally
{
    driver.Close(); // Close the chrome window
    driver.Quit(); // Close the console app that was used to kick off the chrome window
    driver.Dispose(); // Close the chromedriver.exe
}

I was only here to look for answers and didn't intend to provide one. So the above solution is based on my experience only. I was using chrome driver in a C# console app and I was able to clean up the lingering processes only after calling all three methods together.

I am using Protractor with directConnect. Disabling the "--no-sandbox" option fixed the issue for me.

// Capabilities to be passed to the webdriver instance.
capabilities: {
  'directConnect': true,
  'browserName': 'chrome',
  chromeOptions: {
      args: [
        //"--headless",
        //"--hide-scrollbars",
        "--disable-software-rasterizer",
        '--disable-dev-shm-usage',
        //"--no-sandbox",
        "incognito",
        "--disable-gpu",
        "--window-size=1920x1080"]
  }
},

Python code:

try:
    # do my automated tasks
except:
    pass
finally:
    driver.close()
    driver.quit()

per the Selenium API, you really should call browser.quit() as this method will close all windows and kills the process. You should still use browser.quit().

However: At my workplace, we've noticed a huge problem when trying to execute chromedriver tests in the Java platform, where the chromedriver.exe actually still exists even after using browser.quit(). To counter this, we created a batch file similar to this one below, that just forces closed the processes.

kill_chromedriver.bat

@echo off
rem   just kills stray local chromedriver.exe instances.
rem   useful if you are trying to clean your project, and your ide is complaining.

taskkill /im chromedriver.exe /f

Since chromedriver.exe is not a huge program and does not consume much memory, you shouldn't have to run this every time, but only when it presents a problem. For example when running Project->Clean in Eclipse.

Theoretically, calling browser.Quit will close all browser tabs and kill the process.

However, in my case I was not able to do that - since I running multiple tests in parallel, I didn't wanted to one test to close windows to others. Therefore, when my tests finish running, there are still many "chromedriver.exe" processes left running.

In order to overcome that, I wrote a simple cleanup code (C#):

Process[] chromeDriverProcesses =  Process.GetProcessesByName("chromedriver");

foreach(var chromeDriverProcess in chromeDriverProcesses)
{
     chromeDriverProcess.Kill();
}

//Calling close and then quit will kill the driver running process.


driver.close();

driver.quit();

Code c#

using System.Diagnostics;

using System.Management;

        public void KillProcessAndChildren(string p_name)
    {
        ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher
          ("Select * From Win32_Process Where Name = '"+ p_name +"'");

        ManagementObjectCollection moc = searcher.Get();
        foreach (ManagementObject mo in moc)
        {

            try
            {
                KillProcessAndChildren(Convert.ToInt32(mo["ProcessID"]));
            }
            catch (ArgumentException)
            {
                break;
            }
        }

    }

and this function

        public void KillProcessAndChildren(int pid)
    {
        ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher
         ("Select * From Win32_Process Where ParentProcessID=" + pid);
        ManagementObjectCollection moc = searcher.Get();
        foreach (ManagementObject mo in moc)
        {

            try
            {
                KillProcessAndChildren(Convert.ToInt32(mo["ProcessID"]));
            }
            catch
            {
                break;
            }
        }

        try
        {
            Process proc = Process.GetProcessById(pid);

            proc.Kill();
        }
        catch (ArgumentException)
        {
            // Process already exited.
        }
    }

Calling

                try
            {
                 KillProcessAndChildren("chromedriver.exe");
            }
            catch
            {

            }

browser.close() will close only the current chrome window.

browser.quit() should close all of the open windows, then exit webdriver.

I have this issue. I suspect its due to the version of Serenity BDD and Selenium. The chromedriver process never releases until the entire test suite finishes. There are only 97 tests, but having 97 processes eat up the memory of a server that hasn't much resources may be having an affect on the performance.

To address I did 2 things (this is specific to windows).

1. before each test (annotated with @Before) get the process id (PID) of the chromedriver process with:

   List<Integer> pids = new ArrayList<Integer>();
   String out;
   Process p = Runtime.getRuntime().exec("tasklist /FI \"IMAGENAME eq chromedriver.exe*\"");
   BufferedReader input = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(p.getInputStream()));
   while ((out = input.readLine()) != null) {
       String[] items = StringUtils.split(out, " ");
       if (items.length > 1 && StringUtils.isNumeric(items[1])) {
           pids.add(NumberUtils.toInt(items[1]));
       }
   }
   

2. after each test (annotated with @After) kill the PID with:

   Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /PID " + pid);
   

I simply use in every test a method tearDown() as following and I have no problem at all.

@AfterTest
public void tearDown() {
    driver.quit();
    driver = null;
}

After quitting the driver instance clear it from the cache by driver = null

Hope the answer the question

There is another way which is working only for windows, but now it is deprecated. it works for previous selenium releases (it works on 3.11.0 version).

import org.openqa.selenium.os.WindowsUtils;

 WindowsUtils.killByName("chromedriver.exe") // any process name you want

• Make Sure You get the Driver instance as Singleton
• then Apply at end
• driver.close()
• driver.quit()

Note: Now if we see task manager you will not find any driver or chrome process still hanging

I know this is somewhat of an old question, but I thought I'd share what worked for me. I was having problems with Eclipse -- it wouldn't kill the processes, and so I had a bunch of phantom processes hanging around after testing the code using the Eclipse runner.

My solution was to run Eclipse as administrator. That fixed it for me. Seems that Windows wasn't permitting Eclipse to close the process it spawned.

For Ubuntu/Linux users: - the command is either pkill or killall . pkill is generally recommended, since on some systems, killall will actually kill all processes.

It's kinda strange but it works for me. I had the similar issue, after some digging I found that there was still a UI action going on in the browser (URL loading or so), when I hit WebDriver.Quit().

The solution for me (altough very nasty) was to add a Sleep() of 3 seconds before calling Quit().

You should apply close before than quit

driver.close()
driver.quit()

I have used the below in nightwatch.js in afterEach hooks.

afterEach: function(browser, done) {
    // performing an async operation
    setTimeout(function() {
        // finished async duties
        done();
        browser.closeWindow();
        browser.end();
    }, 200);
}

.closeWindow() just simply closes the window. (But wont work for multiple windows opened). Whereas .end() ends all the remaining chrome processes.

I have looked at all the responses and tested them all. I pretty much compiled them all into one as a 'Safety closure'. This in c#

NOTE you can change the param from IModule app to that of the actual driver.

 public class WebDriverCleaner
{

    public static void CloseWebDriver(IModule app)
    {
        try
        {
            if (app?.GetDriver() != null)
            {
                app.GetDriver().Close();
                Thread.Sleep(3000); // Gives time for everything to close before quiting
                app.GetDriver().Quit();
                app.GetDriver().Dispose();
                KillProcessAndChildren("chromedriver.exe"); // One more to make sure we get rid of them chromedrivers.
            }
        }
        catch (Exception e)
        {
            Console.WriteLine(e);
            throw;
        }
    }

    public static void KillProcessAndChildren(string p_name)
    {
        ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher
            ("Select * From Win32_Process Where Name = '" + p_name + "'");

        ManagementObjectCollection moc = searcher.Get();
        foreach (ManagementObject mo in moc)
        {
            try
            {
                KillProcessAndChildren(Convert.ToInt32(mo["ProcessID"]));
            }
            catch (ArgumentException)
            {
                break;
            }
        }

    }


    public static void KillProcessAndChildren(int pid)
    {
        ManagementObjectSearcher searcher = new ManagementObjectSearcher("Select * From Win32_Process Where ParentProcessID=" + pid);
        ManagementObjectCollection moc = searcher.Get();

        foreach (ManagementObject mo in moc)
        {
            try
            {
                KillProcessAndChildren(Convert.ToInt32(mo["ProcessID"]));
            }
            catch
            {
                break;
            }
        }

        try
        {
            Process proc = Process.GetProcessById(pid);
            proc.Kill();
        }
        catch (ArgumentException)
        {
            // Process already exited.
        }
    }

}

I had success when using driver.close() before driver.quit(). I was previously only using driver.quit().

I had the same issue when running it in Python and I had to manually run 'killall' command to kill all processes. However when I implemented the driver using the Python context management protocol all processes were gone. It seems that Python interpreter does a really good job of cleaning things up.

Here is the implementation:

class Browser:
    def __enter__(self):
        self.options = webdriver.ChromeOptions()
        self.options.add_argument('headless')
        self.driver = webdriver.Chrome(chrome_options=self.options)
        return self

    def __exit__(self, exc_type, exc_val, exc_tb):
        self.driver.close()
        self.driver.quit()

And the usage:

with Browser() as browser:
    browser.navigate_to_page()

So, you can use the following:

driver.close()

Close the browser (emulates hitting the close button)

driver.quit()

Quit the browser (emulates selecting the quit option)

driver.dispose()

Exit the browser (tries to close every tab, then quit)

However, if you are STILL running into issues with hanging instances (as I was), you might want to also kill the instance. In order to do that, you need the PID of the chrome instance.

import os
import signal 
driver = webdriver.Chrome()
driver.get(('http://stackoverflow.com'))

def get_pid(passdriver):
    chromepid = int(driver.service.process.pid)
    return (chromepid)

def kill_chrome(thepid)
    try:
        os.kill(pid, signal.SIGTERM)
        return 1
    except:
        return 0

print ("Loaded thing, now I'mah kill it!")
try:
    driver.close()
    driver.quit()
    driver.dispose()
except:
    pass

kill_chrome(chromepid)

If there's a chrome instance leftover after that, I'll eat my hat. :(