PhantomJS repeatedly crashes at 1037 tests due to memory leak on Windows

[Splaktar]

The PhantomJS process quickly eats up 800+ MB of RAM and then crashes repeatedly with PhantomJS 1.9.x on Windows. On OS X, all tests pass without any issues.

References:
karma-runner/karma-phantomjs-launcher#55
karma-runner/karma#1393
karma-runner/karma-phantomjs-launcher#56
Medium/phantomjs#288
https://github.com/gskachkov/phantomjs2

[Splaktar]

@jamesvanleuven seems to be seeing this issue as well.

I have a WIP branch for these changes here: 3a90319
This uses a forked version of the karma-phantomjs-launcher.

I've finished testing this on OS X as well as Windows. On OS X, there is no change in performance between v1.9.x (36s) and v2.0.0 (35s) and all tests continue to pass.

[Splaktar]

As mentioned in karma-runner/karma-phantomjs-launcher#55, you can point your local PHANTOMJS_BIN environment variable to PhantomJS2 to get around this, but that's a couple extra steps (setup env var, install PhantomJS2 separate from npm install, etc) that is not ideal to document. It would also make it harder for new contributors on Windows to get started.

[Splaktar]

OK, in #4736 I've just enabled the use of PhantomJS2 for Windows platforms. This should minimize any side effects while also fixing the Karma test runs on Windows.

[Splaktar]

PR #4736 was rejected as it seems that support for PhantomJS may be removed from Angular Material.

For now the best work around is to use download your own PhantomJS 2 binary and set your PHANTOMJS_BIN. Then the tests will automatically pick up PhantomJS 2 and your tests should not fail due to memory leaks.