Using Multiple page.open in Single Script

Question

My goal is to execute PhantomJS by using:

// adding $op and $er for debugging purposes
exec(\'phantomjs script.js\', $op, $er);
print_r($op);
echo $er;
         


        

Answer 1

I've tried the accepted answer suggestions, but it doesn't work (at least not for v2.1.1).

To be accurate the accepted answer worked some of the time, but I still experienced sporadic failed page.open() calls, about 90% of the time on specific data sets.

The simplest answer I found is to instantiate a new page module for each url.

// first page
var urlA = "http://first/url"
var pageA = require('webpage').create()

pageA.open(urlA, function(status){
    if (status){
        setTimeout(openPageB, 100) // open second page call
    } else{
        phantom.exit(1)
    }
})

// second page
var urlB = "http://second/url"
var pageB = require('webpage').create()

function openPageB(){
    pageB.open(urlB, function(){
        // ... 
        // ...
    })
}

The following from the page module api documentation on the close method says:

close() {void}

Close the page and releases the memory heap associated with it. Do not use the page instance after calling this.

Due to some technical limitations, the web page object might not be completely garbage collected. This is often encountered when the same object is used over and over again. Calling this function may stop the increasing heap allocation.

Basically after I tested the close() method I decided using the same web page instance for different open() calls is too unreliable and it needed to be said.