Cure for hanging PhantomJS processes

For the way I use PhantomJS, it has a habit of hanging and leaving me with a bunch of zombie phantomjs.exe processes. My solution was to put together a timer that would periodically kill all phantomjs.exe processes (and all their descendants) which were older than a specified number of minutes. It’s mildly elegant, but also mildly brutish, and much more overhead than I wanted.

I can’t believe this didn’t occur to me sooner. The easier, cleaner way is to add the following to the script you’re having it run:

var timeout = 60000; // (one minute, for example)

setTimeout(function () {
   phantom.exit();
}, timeout);

var timeout = 60000; // (one minute, for example)

setTimeout(function () {

phantom.exit();

}, timeout);

Now all my phantomjs.exe instances reliably off themselves once the timer elapses.

DJ Grossman