Firefox memory leak: Firefox crashing in some tests

[helkv]

Firefox memory leak:
If there are a lot of actions performed in Firefox without a break, Firefox consumes more and more memory without releasing it. This can lead to a crash of Firefox, if no more memory is available. Firefox releases the memory only after a certain downtime (when no actions are performed in Firefox).
At least the following Firefox versions are affected: 60.0 , 64.0 , ...

Issue for Selenium Tests:
Some Selenium Tests perform a lot of actions in a row without a longer break. These tests will fail if Firefox is used as the executing browser and Firefox crashes because of the described memory leak.

Also see: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55072731/selenium-using-too-much-ram-with-firefox

Affected Selenium Tests:

• In principle every test, if multiple tests are executed before without a break or a restart of the driver
• The data driven tests (CreateDefaultStatementTest, ...)
• The high volume tests (CreateMultipleStatements, ...)

Characteristics (Error messages which occur if Firefox crashes):

• Jenkins crashes [does not respond anymore]
• "... The forked VM terminated without properly saying goodbye. VM crash or System.exit called? ... Error occurred in starting fork, check output in log ..."
• "###!!! [Parent][MessageChannel] Error: ... Channel error: cannot send/recv"
• "org.openqa.selenium.NoSuchSessionException"

Workarounds:

• Restart Firefox before/after the affected tests
  driver.quit();
driver = new FirefoxDriver();
• Wait a certain time before/after/within the affected tests
  Thread.sleep(30000);
• Run tests in Chrome