release Selenium chromedriver.exe from memory

Question

I set up a python code to run Selenium chromedriver.exe. At the end of the run I have browser.close() to close the instance. (browser = webdriver.Chrome()) I believe it should release chromedriver.exe from memory (I'm on Windows 7). However after each run there is one chromedriver.exe instance remain in the memory. I hope there is a way I can write something in python to kill the chromedriver.exe process. Obviously browser.close() doesn't do the work. Thanks.

Answer 1

per the Selenium API, you really should call browser.quit() as this method will close all windows and kills the process. You should still use browser.quit().

However: At my workplace, we've noticed a huge problem when trying to execute chromedriver tests in the Java platform, where the chromedriver.exe actually still exists even after using browser.quit(). To counter this, we created a batch file similar to this one below, that just forces closed the processes.

kill_chromedriver.bat

@echo off
rem   just kills stray local chromedriver.exe instances.
rem   useful if you are trying to clean your project, and your ide is complaining.

taskkill /im chromedriver.exe /f

Since chromedriver.exe is not a huge program and does not consume much memory, you shouldn't have to run this every time, but only when it presents a problem. For example when running Project->Clean in Eclipse.