WebDriver is not deleting the profile directory after test exits

[lukeis]

Originally reported on Google Code with ID 1934

What steps will reproduce the problem?
1. On running RemoteWebDriver with an instantiated FirefoxProfile it creates 2 directories:
anonymous* and webdriver*(some random number) in “C:\Documents and Settings\<UserName>\Local
Settings\Temp”. The directory webdriver* (of ~2200K) is not removed after WebDriver
finishes its job.

What is the expected output? What do you see instead?
Either it should not create the directory or it should delete it after finishing it's
job


What version of the product are you using? On what operating system?
Windows XP
Selenium 2.0rc3


Please provide any additional information below.
I am not whether it will create a problem in WebDriver however it may slow the System
performance and will unnecessary eats up the system disk space. 

Also it seems related to Issue 1211 (http://code.google.com/p/selenium/issues/detail?id=1211).

Reported by contact@vaidabogdan.com on 2011-06-27 11:02:42

[lukeis]

Which language binding? The temp file creation and deletion is handled differently by
the different language bindings, so knowing which language you're using is important
in this case.

Reported by james.h.evans.jr on 2011-06-27 11:33:39

• Status changed: NeedsClarification

[lukeis]

I use Java for the development.

Reported by contact@vaidabogdan.com on 2011-06-27 11:44:39

[lukeis]

My experience is the same while setup combo is win7/webdriver 2.0rc3/java. Can it affect
performance of the regression run?

Reported by wantashish on 2011-06-29 10:44:51

[lukeis]

A patch is attached that fixes this issue.

Reported by barancev on 2011-06-30 22:40:12

---

- _Attachment: [FirefoxProfile.patch](https://storage.googleapis.com/google-code-attachments/selenium/issue-1934/comment-4/FirefoxProfile.patch)_

[lukeis]

Reported by francois.reynaud on 2011-07-01 07:31:50

[lukeis]

I'm not entirely sure how this fixes the issue: the "dir" being deleted is already marked
as a temporary filesystem and should be deleted when the jvm exits. Deleting the temporary
directory before the FirefoxProfile is actually discarded will cause some stability
problems too.

Am I missing something very obvious?

Reported by simon.m.stewart on 2011-07-03 12:17:55

[lukeis]

i think the problem is for long running server in grid for instance.

Reported by francois.reynaud on 2011-07-03 12:32:34

[lukeis]

1. Yes, Francois is right, for a long running server (especially a virtual machine with
a small disk) it is a problem. Each profile can be several megabytes in size if some
FF plugins are used (e.g. firebug is about 2MB), several hundreds of tests causes "low
disk space" situation.

2. Actually, dir is a temporary directory that contains a profile extracted from json
string, but FirefoxProfile(dir) constructor copies content of this directory (webdriver*)
to a new profile  directory (anonymous*), and immediately after copying dir can be
safely removed. So, I think there is no need to wait until exit.

Reported by barancev on 2011-07-03 14:14:09

[lukeis]

Any Updates on this issue, as i am doing evaluation of the framework to adopt it in
my team. each time i run a script it creates 19MB file in temp directory which can
be disastrous for system running multiple test cases.

Reported by Talwindersingh on 2011-08-04 11:22:59

[lukeis]

I have encountered this issue as well. My long-running Selenium server, running on a
small VM with 8 GB of diskapce, is running out of diskspace due to temporary files
under /tmp.

I noticed that these files are cleaned up on JVM exit (probably because of the tmp
file status). However, for long-running server, this represents a leak, since the JVM
would not be restarted often.

Also interesting to note that I don't seem to have the same problem on Windows, only
on Linux do I see thousands of leaked profile directories (although my Linux usage
is a lot heavier, so this may not be a valid observation).

Reported by peterkwanchan on 2011-08-31 21:16:13