It is possible to collect the dumps of Appium’s memory usage to be analyzed for problems. This is extrememly useful for finding memory leaks.
Enabling
The feature is enabled by starting Appium with the –enable-heapdump server argument
appium –enable-heapdump
Creating a dump file
To create a dump file at any given time, execute the command
kill -SIGUSR2 <PID>
Dump files are created in the same folder as the main Appium script was executed. They will have the .heapsnapshot extension, and can be loaded into the Chrome Inspector for further investigation.
Installation
For this feature to work, the heapdump package must be installed and available to the Appium. This can be done either by installing heapdump in the Appium directory
cd <location of appium installation>
npm install heapdump
Alternatively, since heapdump is built on install, it may be helpful to install it once and then link it to the Appium installation
npm install -g heapdump
cd <location of appium installation>
npm link heapdump
The installation of heapdump requires Python 2. If you do not have Python installed, make sure you install Python 2, not 3. If you have Python 3 installed, install Python 2.
