Selenium initiated ChromeDriver keeps running in background

Question

I am not able to completely delete a project, because the chromedriver instance is running in the background, even when there is no code is being executed. Please see the below image.

The error I get while the project deletion is:

Take the below code for instance:

import java.util.concurrent.TimeUnit;

import org.openqa.selenium.WebDriver;
import org.openqa.selenium.chrome.ChromeDriver;

public class Test {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {

        String url = "https://www.google.com";
        System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "src/driver/chromedriver.exe");
        WebDriver driver = new ChromeDriver();
        driver.manage().window().maximize();
        driver.manage().timeouts().implicitlyWait(30, TimeUnit.SECONDS);
        driver.get(url);
        System.out.println(driver.getTitle());

    }
}

Try running this code, say 5 times, and there will be 5 background running instances. Tried restarting Eclipse, with no luck.

I understand this is happening because I am not writing this line:

driver.close();

But normally, when the main-thread dies, all supporting running instances should die with it.

Is this a known issue, or I am scripting something wrong.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You need to take care of a couple of things as follows:

1. Try running this code, say 5 times, and there will be 5 background running instances: This is because each time you have opened a new driver instance which you have never released.

2. Tried restarting Eclipse, with no luck: Its worth mentioning that Eclipse is an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) which helps us to construct programming steps through a programming language. So through Eclipse we write programs/steps for Selenium to open/close a browser session and quit a driver session. But Eclipse have no control over the execution done by Selenium in-terms of open/close a browser session and quit a driver session. Hence restarting Eclipse would make no difference.

3. driver.close(): This command will help you only to Close the browser session/window on which currently the driver have the focus.

4. when the main-thread dies, all supporting running instances should die with it: You are right. It is the WebDriver instance (i.e. driver - as per your code) which opens all the browser sessions every-time. So when your program ends you should always call driver.quit() which Closes all browser windows, quits the driver and safely ends the session.

---

However, at any point of time you can forcefully kill all the instances of WebDriver variants e.g. geckodriver, selenium-chromedriver, selenium-iedriver through os specific methods as follows:

• Java Solution(Windows):

  import java.io.IOException;
  
  public class Kill_ChromeDriver_GeckoDriver_IEDriverserver 
  {
      public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception 
      {
          Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /IM geckodriver.exe /T");
          Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /IM chromedriver.exe /T");
          Runtime.getRuntime().exec("taskkill /F /IM IEDriverServer.exe /T");
      }
  }
  

• Python Solution(Windows):

  import os
  os.system("taskkill /f /im geckodriver.exe /T")
  os.system("taskkill /f /im chromedriver.exe /T")
  os.system("taskkill /f /im IEDriverServer.exe /T")
  

• Python Solution(Cross Platform):

  import os
  import psutil
  
  PROCNAME = "geckodriver" # or chromedriver or IEDriverServer
  for proc in psutil.process_iter():
      # check whether the process name matches
      if proc.name() == PROCNAME:
          proc.kill()