Configuration of selenium webdriver with xorg-x11-server-Xvfb

Question

We have developed selenium webdriver script with junit+java using eclipse on window 7. All the scripts are working as expected now we are using this script for load testing using Jmeter. However, while running script system open multiple browser (200) based on user thread and it create system to hang, is there any way to handle this or we can run script without opening browser. I have come across xvfb tool, but not able to get java api for this tool to plugin in eclipse.

We have also tried using HtmlUnitDriver but as it does not support javascript hence the test is getting failed, also we tried HtmlUnit and found same thing.

Note: that we have writen webdriver script to maintain display item of element (autocomplete, image) on screen.

It would be great if anyone can help or provide more inputs on this...

Answer 1

Firstly, do not integrate selenium scripts with JMeter for load testing! It's not a good approach to follow due to the obvious consequences that you have mentioned in your post. I followed a similar apporach in the beginning when I was new to JMeter and selenium but suffered a great deal when it came to running load tests that spawned too many browser instances which killed the OS.

You can go for HtmlUnitDriver or any headless browser testing tools out there with JMeter, but still, they will be running the browser internally in the memory. Moreover if your application is heavily using Javascript, it won't help.

So I would suggest that you record a browsing session with JMeter Proxy and modify the script (set of requests) according to your needs and play those requests alone, with number of threads.

From a higher level, you should be doing this:

1. Add a JMeter test plan, listeners, thread group and setup JMeter proxy and record a browsing session where you enter something into the autocomplete textbox and you get certain results.

2. Stop your proxy and take a look at all the requests that come under your thread group.

3. As far as I know, when it comes to autocomplete plugins, multiple requests are sent everytime you enter a letter into the textbox. For example, for the word 'stackoverflow':
   

   Request1: q=s
   Request2: q=st
   Request3: q=sta
   and so on

   Here you can simulate this effect by including words such that all words have the same length which in turn will let you have same number of requests to be sent to the server.
   

4. So in your test plan, you will pass one word per Jmeter thread. You can pass the words to a request, from a csv file by using jmeter parametrization.
   
   

This will be a much memory efficient way of load testing instead of using selenium with JMeter. I had asked a similar question. You can check out the responses.