I have a system to test, which is a video ads distribution technology. I need to load every video like 1-2 mins to serve the ads. The videos are played in a Flash client and streamed as FLV streams like in YouTube.
The reason why I need to test it only via browsers -- and every other method won't work -- is to stress test both the video streaming servers and the ads servers simultaneously and displaying ads in real-time.
I have used Selenium, WatiN, Automation Anywhere and many other automation tools. However, when I am trying to start like 10000 browsers on my machine (32GB RAM, 16-core CPU), none of them are able to do the job.
With Selenium, I am able to start the maximum FireFox instances so far, but that's still too low: half of the instances don't run the test.
Any suggestions to do with Selenium?
You aren't going to run 10,000 browsers on your machine. That would give 3.2MB of physical memory per browser instance and I'm pretty sure FireFox just won't like that.
You could create a JMeter script that hits your server with many threads. It won't interact with the UI but would simulate the load of many clients hitting whatever URLs you tell it. I believe it also includes the ability to record a session and play it back for easy setup of your sessions.
Selenium isn't really optimized for load/stress testing, especially if you're running your browsers locally. Running 1000+ browsers is going to choke even the beefiest server. Though RAM is an obvious bottleneck, you also have limited CPU resources and bandwidth. The latter being a primary concern if you are loading videos.
Not to mention you'd be testing from a single IP with 10k browsers, so load balancing may not kick in properly, as well as the actual distribution of video ads to specific virtual users.
If you want to stick with existing Selenium tests, I've had good experiences with BrowserMob. They basically have a huge grid to do real browser load-testing, distributed across AWS.
Another recommendation would be an actual performance testing tool. I'd recommend Soasta CloudTest. They have a free version that runs 100 users so you can see if it will be a good fit for you. I have found that scripting for CloudTest is relatively simple.
Disclaimer: My experiences with both companies have been as a paying customer and I have never worked for either.
If you are using Windows machine then as per my experience there is a limit on number of browser window instances to be opened. As per my test last time, it does restrict between 100-150 browser windows.
I would recommend you using headless robot, which doesn't require opening browser window. I think latest version of Selenium has that capability. But it seems to be more like a load test as you are trying to simulate 10,000+ user instances, I would recommend you using load testing tool like JMeter or LoadRunner.
It looks to me that you are trying to verify what the client will see based on high traffic, no?
In that case, Joel is quite correct. If you absolutely have to see what the client sees, you could use threaded hits and just dump the results in a database. That'll show you anything the client would see anyway, and it's a lot easier to sort through than thousands of browser instances.
Either way, your client will not see errors if there are no errors present on the server side. If you're testing functionality in bandwidth restricted environments, CPU-intensive environments, or memory-intensive environments, those are much easier achieved than running thousands of browser instances.
Your post smells of some form of ad-based fraud to me, but either way: have you considered using different web browsers besides Firefox? PhantomJS is a headless webkit-based browser that is compatible with Selenium. It supports all the core browser features like DOM handling, CSS selectors, Javascript and Canvas. I do not know if it supports Flash.
This post has a decent list of other headless and automatable web-browsers that you might consider.
Also, if each browser instance is instantiating a Flash plugin, don't neglect the possibility that the issue could be with Flash and not Firefox. Alternatively, why instantiate several different Firefox processes? Can you accomplish what you want through the use of tabs instead?
The in-house way to this wiht selenium is using browsermob proxy and multiple broswser agents to recreate the experience of different users, changing the ip is more difficult because it requires changing your home network.
Here is a good example
Related
Currently I'm trying to run a load test which walks through a uniquely created URL. I know JMeter is often used for load testing, but I was specifically asked to do it through something like Selenium that uses real browsers to create the URL then open that URL and complete the steps within the URL. I have created a Selenium script that can easily do this, but I need to do this 100 times concurrently and can't find a good way to do.
Is there a way to do this? I've looked into Selenium Grid but I'm not sure if I even have enough nodes to run 100 browsers concurrently. Please if you have recommendations for software or a different method of doing this I would love to hear it. Thank you!
JMeter can be integrated with Selenium using WebDriver Sampler so you can re-use your code and rely on JMeter's multithreading capabilities.
If one machine won't be powerful enough to kick off 100 browsers - you can consider going for Distributed Testing
In general be aware that browsers don't do any magic, they just send HTTP requests, wait for responses and render them. JMeter is not capable only of rendering the page, but if you need to load test the backend - it can mimic browser's network footprint with 100% accuracy, just make sure to configure JMeter accordingly in order to behave like a real browser
JavaScript execution time and page rendering speed can be checked either using single WebDriver Sampler or a separate solution like Lighthouse
I'm trying to scrape my own banking information by automating the process using Selenium in Ruby.
I'm running into a bizarre situation where performing the exact same sequence in the browser (whether just the normal browser or private/incognito) works fine, but when I try to log in under a Selenium-controlled browser I get back a strange 500 error from the server.
I've noticed the browser console logs also look different in terms of certain logging messages related to cookies, JS errors, libraries being loaded, etc.
I have found an answer on SO mentioning one possible difference in Chrome being a specific "cdc" string that might be detectable, but is there some kind of corresponding difference in Firefox/Geckodriver that could be used to detect the fact that I'm trying to automate the browser?
I'm not really sure where to look, because my understand was that running via Selenium should basically have identical behaviour to running via the browser itself.
Would love some guidance on what mechanisms may be in play to explain the difference in behaviour!
I'd like to crawl a set of random websites received from a URL generator, using Selenium's ChromeDriver with Crawljax to do static code analysis on the captured DOM states.
Is this potentially unsafe for the machine doing the crawling?
My concern is that one of the randomly generated sites is malicious and that execution of JavaScript from ChromeDriver (which is used to capture the new DOM states) infects the machine running the test somehow. Should I be running this in some kind of sandboxed environment?
--edit--
If it matters, the crawler is implemented entirely in Java.
Simple answer, no. Only if your afraid of cookies, and even if you are, your machine isn't.
It's hard to say it's very secure,you should aware of that there is no absolute secure in network.Recently,a chrome RCE has been put out,details:
SSD Advisory – Chrome Turbofan Remote Code Execution – SecuriTeam Blogs
Maybe this can effect on Selenium's ChromeDriver
But you can do some enforce on your system,such as change your firewall mode to white list,only allow your python script and selenium to access internet on port 80,443.
Even if your system pwned by RCE,the malicious code still can't access internet,unless it inject to you python process(I think it's very hard to do with js script in Browser RCE).
Another option:Install HIPS,if your python script want to do anything else but crawl web page(such as start an other process) or read/write some other files,you will know it and decide what to do.
In my oppion,do your crawl thing in a VM and do some enforce on firewall(Windows firewall or Linux iptables),shutdown useless services in windows.That's enough.
In a word,it's diffcult to find the balance between security and convenience and do not believe your system is unbreakable
Over 2 years I tested web application with help Selenium framework. I know the best design is testing on VM.
The only one downside of this - it's very slow testing. Why?
browser only gets so much memory, if you will run several instances.
site coud be very slow.
connections can be very slow.
Would be great if there was a framework that emulated the browser (engine/core) correctly and can provide some results (api) for surf on the page.
I don't mean to simulate just on the one browser with different version (like IE). I mean to simulate for all browsers with very popular and newest version.
Does anyone know a framework/tool that can do it?
Thank you.
You can try PhantomJS for example.
From their page:
PhantomJS is a headless WebKit with JavaScript API. It has fast and
native support for various web standards: DOM handling, CSS selector,
JSON, Canvas, and SVG.
You can use it in combination with Jasmine (as well as several other frameworks) for testing.
However the selection of available engines is limited to WebKit. I doubt that Selenium will be easy to replace. By the way it looks like Selenium will probably become a W3C standard over the next years.
You can also run Selenium with Xvfb - I use it to execute test on remote server and it is going very well.
In my current project we are testing our ASP.NET GUI using WatiN and Mbunit.
When I was writing the tests I realized that it would be great if we also could use all of these for stresstesting. Currently we are using Grinder to stresstest but then we have to script our cases all over again which for many reasons isent that good.
I have been trying to find a tool that can use my existing tests to create load on the site and record stats, but so far i have found noting. Is there such a tool or is there an easy way to create one?
We have issues on our build server when running WatiN tests as it often throws timeouts trying to access the Internet Explorer COM component. It seems to hang randomly while waiting for the total page to load.
Given this, I would not recommend it for stress testing as the results will be inaccurate and the tests are likely to be slow.
I would recommend JMeter for making threaded calls to the HTTP requests that your GUI is making
For load testing there is a tool which looks promising - LoadStorm. Free for 25 users. It has zero deployment needs as this is a cloud based service.
You could build a load controller for your stress testing. It could take your watin tests and run them in a multithreaded/multiprocessed way.
If you are comfortable using Selenium instead of WatiN, check out BrowserMob for browser-based load testing. I'm one of the Selenium RC authors and started BrowserMob to provide a new way to load test. By using real browsers, rather than simulated traffic, tests end up being much easier to script and maintain.