Phantom instances

Gustavo Navarro

I am using jsreport-core to convert html to pdf and send the pdf by email.

My structure is the following:

var jsreport = require ('jsreport-core') ();

var contentPDF = '<html> <body> hello world and other things ... </ body> </ html>';

jsreport.init (). then (function () {
    return jsreport.render ({
      template: {
        content: contentPDF,
        engine: 'none',
        recipe: 'phantom-pdf'
      }
    })
});

I have a service on my server that runs every so often, generates the reports that I have to generate and sends them, but I'm having problems with my server because phantom creates several instances and consumes a lot of memory and causes my server to die.

I'm trying to use something like this:

var jsreport = require ('jsreport-core') ();
jsreport.use (require ('jsreport-phantom-pdf') ({"numberOfWorkers": 1, "strategy": "phantom-server"}));

but it seems to have no effect; Do you have any suggestions or help that you can give me? Is that the solution or is there something that is ignoring or doing wrong?

I appreciate the help you can give me.

jan_blaha

This initialization should result in using single phantomjs worker. Try to print logs to console.
For example by setting this at the top of your file.

process.env.debug = 'jsreport'

jan_blaha

Or write some debug information here .

Gustavo Navarro

I'm not good at debugging, but checking the phantomManager.js file I could verify that if the parameters are being passed and Phantom creates the instances that I configured.

The problem is that you are not deleting those instances or reusing them, simply create new ones, which leaves my server without memory. I believe that with the kill method it removes the instances when the process ends:

process.once("exit", function () {
self.kill();
});

But he is not eliminating them. Help me please.

jan_blaha

Do you call jsreport.init just once? The instances should be reused if you do.

Gustavo Navarro

That said, that would be the problem. Then I ask for your help or advice in this regard; This is what my service does:

I do not want to schedule tasks in the cron of my server, so I created a service in NodeJs using cronjs library, which runs every hour and check in the database the reports that are scheduled at that time, I go through the elements of the I list one by one and for each report I execute the jsreport.init method, I create the report and send it, and every hour I do the same.

var job = new CronJob ({
cronTime: '0 0 * * * *',
onTick: function () {
    login()
    .then (getScheduledReports)
    .then (function (data) {
        data.reduce (function (promise, schReport) {

            // This is where I run the jsreport.init method and the code is similar to this one, please ignore the indentation and other details (hehe).

            jsreport.init (). then (function () {
                return jsreport.render ({
                  // parameters
                }). then (sendMail)
            });

        }, new Q ());
    }
},
start: true,
timeZone: 'America / Bogota'
});
job.start ();

jan_blaha

You should initialize jsreport just once. In the outer scope somewhere. Then call just jsreport.render.
I don't understand why you call init every time, can you elaborate on it?

Gustavo Navarro

I think I had a bad interpretation. I thought that the init method should be executed every time you want to render a report.

jan_blaha

No, just once. Otherwise it would part of the render.
There is quite heavy code running inside init and that is why it is extracted.