Capybara Poltergeist IOError: closed stream

Question

I am using Capybara for web page scraping. I noticed a problem in which afterwards Poltergeist hangs around in the memory eating system resources. The Poltergeist Github page notes that there is a memory leak issue with Capybara (https://github.com/teampoltergeist/poltergeist) and they recommend calling

session.driver.quit

That fixes the memory issue for me, but when I want to use Capybara again later I receive the error message:

IOError: closed stream

I believe just refreshing the Capybara session will fix this but can't find a public method that allows me to restart with a brand new session.

1) Is there a method that will fix my issue?

2) Is resetting the session the best way of reopening the stream?

Answer 1

The solution that worked best was to initiate a new Capybara session like this:

session = Capybara::Session.new(:poltergeist, Rails.application)
session.visit(...)
session.driver.quit

For my program I encapsulated it in a WebScraper module like this:

module WebScraper
  attr_accessor :session

  delegate :visit, :save_screenshot, to: :session

  def start_session
    @session ||= Capybara::Session.new(:poltergeist, Rails.application)
  end

  def end_session
    @session.driver.quit
    @session = nil
  end
end