Speed up selenium webdriver?

Question

I'm using selenium webdriver to automate web page usage. Headless browser not allowed.

Selenium seems rather slow at finding multiple elements on a single page that is fully loaded.

Does anyone have any tips for how to speed things up? I am generally searching for objects via xpath.

I have searched google and read similar SO posts . I am looking for new ideas

Answer 1

in this case i like to create a org.​w3c.​dom Document using the page source and then parse it using the javax.xml libary:

public static Document getWebpageDocument_fromSource(String source) throws InterruptedException, IOException {
    try {
        HtmlCleaner cleaner = new HtmlCleaner();
        CleanerProperties props = cleaner.getProperties();
        props.setAllowHtmlInsideAttributes(true);
        props.setAllowMultiWordAttributes(true);
        props.setRecognizeUnicodeChars(true);
        props.setOmitComments(true);

        DocumentBuilderFactory builderFactory = DocumentBuilderFactory.newInstance();
        DocumentBuilder builder = null;
        try {
            builder = builderFactory.newDocumentBuilder();
        } catch (ParserConfigurationException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        TagNode tagNode = new HtmlCleaner().clean(source);

        Document doc = new DomSerializer(new CleanerProperties()).createDOM(tagNode);

        return doc;
    } catch (ParserConfigurationException ex) {
        ex.printStackTrace();
        return null;
    }
}

and then accessing elements via xpath like this:

String myXpathStr = "//*[@id='news-main']/div";
XPath xPath = XPathFactory.newInstance().newXPath();
NodeList articleBlocks = (NodeList)xPath.compile(myXpathStr).evaluate(doc, XPathConstants.NODESET);

hope that helps. i also agree with the other answers that id and css are faster. i've found xpath to be more powerful but I don't have a lot of experience with css paths

Answer 2

I search by id , class name and other easily identifiable elements. But speed is going to be based on things like network connection and hardware. You can alway use the HTMLDriver , as this will be the quickest version of the driver.