How do i make a Selenium WebDriver run for many hours(CHO) without it causing a crash / OutOfMemory problems?

Question

I am using selenium-2.30.0 to run a single test(on windows) which runs for many hours (~ 8 Hrs). I was using the FF driver, but it runs out of memory after just 45 minutes or less, & the test execution just hangs. I was unable to use HTMLUnitDriver (i thought a pure java solution was the answer) to run the same way as the FF driver (as it needs to wait for page loads & I definitely didn't want to put random thread sleeps in my code or implement any new function by extending the HTMLUnitDriver).

• I cannot break the test case to multiple smaller units.
• I cannot reload the driver as and when i see heavy memory utilization

Is there any way to get this working?

Answer 1

I found this link:creating-firefox-profile-for-your-selenium-rc-tests, & was quite helpful. Created a new firefox profile with absolute minimal settings, & the test has been running without issues for the last 4 hours. Thanks a lot for the help guys !

Answer 2

What sort of testing are you doing? Selenium is used primarily for Acceptance tests. It sounds like what you're trying to do is more like a soak test on your system.

If that's the case, take a look at JMeter, it's much more suited to this type of work. However, a rather significant difference between the two technologies is that JMeter works at the protocol (HTTP Request) level as opposed to Selenium's use of the rendered HTML.

Answer 3

What does crash, your Java test code or Firefox itself? If it's the Java test code, then are you sure that you're not leaking memory? Or maybe the memory leak is in the server side?