Memory Collection

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It is possible to collect the dumps of Appium’s memory usage to be analyzed for problems. This is extrememly useful for finding memory leaks.

Enabling

The feature is enabled by starting Appium with the –enable-heapdump server argument

appium –enable-heapdump

Creating a dump file

To create a dump file at any given time, execute the command

kill -SIGUSR2 <PID>

Dump files are created in the same folder as the main Appium script was executed. They will have the .heapsnapshot extension, and can be loaded into the Chrome Inspector for further investigation.

Installation

For this feature to work, the heapdump package must be installed and available to the Appium. This can be done either by installing heapdump in the Appium directory

cd <location of appium installation>

npm install heapdump

Alternatively, since heapdump is built on install, it may be helpful to install it once and then link it to the Appium installation

npm install -g heapdump

cd <location of appium installation>

npm link heapdump

The installation of heapdump requires Python 2. If you do not have Python installed, make sure you install Python 2, not 3. If you have Python 3 installed, install Python 2.

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