Selenium test random failures

[Frantz D.]

Hi,

We are using Selenium with JUnit for some integration testing in a
continous integration environment (SVN, Maven, Hudson...)
The Seleniums tests are played every nigths, on our integration
server : Windows 7 - 64 bits, using IE 8.

We are facing the following problem : some times one of the tests
fails at random with the following error :
com.thoughtworks.selenium.SeleniumException: Timed out after 30000ms
at
com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.throwAssertionFailureExceptionOrError(HttpCommandProcessor.java:
97)
at
com.thoughtworks.selenium.HttpCommandProcessor.doCommand(HttpCommandProcessor.java:
91)
at
com.thoughtworks.selenium.DefaultSelenium.open(DefaultSelenium.java:
335)

The failure rate is less than 20%
We have checked the Weblogic server logs, there is nothing to worry
about here : the webapp anser correctly to the HTTP request.

What software component is the guilty ? :
IE 8 ? : (we think to check about the IE 8's "last active session" or
"session merging" functionnalities...)
Selenium RC : in a such environment ?

Is someone has experienced a similar problem ?
This a big issue : because ao it we cannot trust our integration
tests.

The cat takes my tongue...

Thank you.

[Brian Kitchener]

It sounds like your web page is randomly taking more than 30 seconds
to load. Have you tried increasing the timeout?

I would recommend taking a screenshot on errors, so you can identify
the problem easier. looking at the web page it should be apparent if
the page loaded correctly or not.

[Frantz D.]

Sure, the page may take randomly taking more than 30 seconds
to load...but what software component is the guilty ? This is the question... (may be IE 8 or Selenium RC or Hudson...)

 

The page is very simple and very light (basic home page with a welcome message and the app version number).

We have check the weblogic server logs : the server always responds very quikly.

(Actualy, the page was always served almost instantanly.)

There is no errors in the server"s log files.

 

How to take a screen shot of the web page ? I really dunno, because the work is done in a remote server.

The Selenuim test is launch every nights by a Hudson's job using Maven.

 

And the pity is :  we cannot reproduce the issue in any DEV computers.

The problem only occurs on the remote integration server.

So, this why we are thinking about an environment issue.

 

any ideas ?

 

Thanks

 

 

[Jayakumar C]

 

How to take a screen shot of the web page ? I really dunno, because the work is done in a remote server.

You could consider using captureScreenshotToString().
http://seleniumexamples.com/blog/examples/capturing-screenshots-from-remote-selenium-rc/

--
Jayakumar

[Frantz D.]

Ok, I have done something like you said.

But it dosen't help beacuse the Hudson process (and sub-process) is launched by a system user account with no graphic session opened, so the screen capture I got back is a pitch black rectangle ;-)

 

I'm currently thinking to surround each test's method by a try-catch-retry block...