The performance of my scripts is very slow when running on IE11. Some of my scripts run on chrome in 2-3 mins and that takes more than 25 minutes on IE. I am using Robot Framework and most of my locators are xpath. My application does not have ID locators for the elements. I tried switching to CSS for experimental purpose but that improved the performance by little margin. I understand that since IE does not have a native xpath engine, IEdriverserver uses wicked-good-xpath for parsing. This xpath library is supposed to be the fastest. Is there any other modification/enhancement I can do to improve the performance of my scripts.
-
The performance is awful when I am traversing the DOM over a list of elements. such as fetching text from a list of span, div etc – user3262242 Jul 30 '16 at 05:16
1 Answers
If You are using 64-bit
IEdriverserver, You need to replace it with 32-bit
of IEdriverserver because 64-bit of IEdriverserver is very very slow for the execution.
IE driver to determine the root cause. When you are running IE 10 or higher on a 64-bit version of Windows, by default the process which hosts the containing window that includes the browser chrome (address bar, navigation buttons, menus, etc.) is a 64-bit process. The process which hosts the window where content is actually rendered (within each tab) is a 32-bit process.
Some notes. Careful readers will have already realized that this means that even when you are running 64-bit Windows, you're likely using a 32-bit version of IE to render the content. This is a powerful argument for continuing to use the 32-bit version of the IE driver for IE 10 and above: you're not actually running against a 64-bit version of IE.
If you insist that you must run the 64-bit version of IEDriverServer.exe, you can disable native events by setting the nativeEvents
capability to false using whatever mechanism your language binding provides for this.
Hope it helps..:)

- 23,507
- 10
- 54
- 73
-
Thanks Saurabh, I did that. But the performance did not improve much. The time taken for the execution in chrome and Firefox is around 3 minutes but the IE is is about 17 minutes. The script mostly traverses through a table to fetch data. – user3262242 Aug 07 '16 at 03:07
-
@user3262242 I would suggest you try to use cssSelector mostly if possible because IE is much slower with the xpath...:) – Saurabh Gaur Aug 07 '16 at 03:49
-
It does not help much when I run tests on IE with tests written in Robot Framework – user3262242 Dec 24 '16 at 16:01