Running Selenium in Windows Server vs Linux Server

[Navraj Singh]

Hi everyone,

We have an automation code written using Selenium and Python that we are running on our local machine. We want to move the code to a server so that all our team members can execute it periodically from their local devices.


I would really appreciate if any of you can share your experience with using a server before.
1. Which server would be better in terms of functionality, performance and security - Windows or Linux?
2. Currently, we have only automated a web browser task. In future, if we want to scale up and add additional functionality of Selenium, is there any preferred choice for a server?
3. Are there any specific concerns about one of these servers?

Thank you
Navraj

[David]

For maintenance and deployment aspect, may be based on what expertise exists within your team or organization to determine whether Windows or Linux is better choice, like what are the personnel experienced with, are you a Windows or Linux shop?

Performance & security aspect, can't say but assume Linux may be better, assuming with the right maintenance and configuration.

The one benefit for picking Windows server I would think is if you ever had a need to run non-headless UI automation involving Windows desktop, you can't get that with Linux. You can utilize the terminal server feature of remote desktop for scaling multiple UI desktop sessions. Or just use the built in remote desktop feature (less scale but no extra licensing cost, probably up to 3 remote desktop sessions, with one of them being the physical local desktop session 0 that you can redirect to/as a remote session).

[Navraj Singh]

Thank you so much for your input, David!