Protractor: It is running very slow

[gaelazzo]

I'm using protractor with phantomjs and jasmine to test a very simple application, that does little more than a login/logout. Page response measured by node time are about 1-2 ms, but 9 tests with 11 assertion are taking 35 sec to complete.
I'm simply checking the login / logout are working sending some good/bad user credential, so I wonder if those test-timings are normal using protractor.
For comparison, always with phantomjs, client-unit test, with 232 tests and 1735 assertions are taking about 3.2 sec, while server-unit tests with 183 tests are taking 0.42 sec, and those are doing a lot of db query, transactions and so on. 23 Midway tests are taking 2.11 sec. All done with jasmine, karma, phantomjs.
So I don't understand where is the problem with protractor. Any suggestion?
Thanks

[juliemr]

The slowness may be in your webpage - protractor waits for your page to stabilize before performing any action, so if it's slow loading any part of the page that will slow down your final tests.

[gaelazzo]

Thanks julie,
it is a page with a pair of textbox, user and password necessary for login. I've measured response time from server and they are about 2-3 ms for page. There is no image or strange things... is there any way to understand where it is blocking?

[juliemr]

We'd like to surface more information about timing - see #674. In the meantime - you might want to take a look at the ghostdriver logs to see if it's happening on the ghostdriver -> phantomJS side.

[gaelazzo]

My protractor.conf.js contains:
capabilities: {
browserName: 'phantomjs', //chrome firefox phantomjs
'phantomjs.binary.path': './node_modules/phantomjs/bin/phantomjs.exe',
'phantomjs.cli.args': ['--debug=true', '--webdriver-logfile=webdriver.log', '--webdriver-loglevel=DEBUG']
// (loglevels supported: 'ERROR', 'WARN', 'INFO', 'DEBUG') (default 'INFO')
}
so I suppose I should have a webdriver.log file somewhere. I've searched for it in the entire disk without success. Or may be that parameter is not being considered. I'll continue investigating..

[maxtardiveau]

I have run into this issue, where retrieving data from a page is very slow, and I have come up with a much faster way -- see http://docs.espressologic.com/blog/letsspeedupprotractorsdatalookup

For whatever reason, WebDriver can sometimes be very slow when pulling some data from the DOM, so we go directly to the browser. It's a little bit hackish, but the performance difference is dramatic -- something that used to take 7 seconds now runs in 90ms.

[gaelazzo]

In my case I've a simple login form with two textbox. I'll try getting value with a so injected script and I'll see what happens. But sincerely it seems to me too much work and little readability

[gaelazzo]

I still don't get where it is blocking. I make a little example with some timings

 var     baseUrl = 'http://localhost:8888/',
            nTest=1;

beforeEach(function (done) {
    console.time('start'+ nTest);
    browserGet(baseUrl);  
    done();
  });

afterEach(function(done){
    console.timeEnd('start'+ nTest);
    nTest+=1;
    done();
  });

function elementById(id) {
  console.time('start elementById ' + id);
  var el = ptor.findElement(protractor.By.id(id));
  console.timeEnd('start elementById ' + id);
  return el;
}


function browserGet(url){
  console.time('start browserGet' + url);
  browser.get(url);
  console.timeEnd('start browserGet' + url);
}

function getCurrentUrl() {
  console.time('start getCurrentUrl' + nTest);
  var u = ptor.getCurrentUrl();
  console.timeEnd('start getCurrentUrl' + nTest);
  return u;
}


 it('/ should redirect to login page', function (done) {
    browserGet(baseUrl);
    expect(getCurrentUrl()).toBe(baseUrl + 'login');
    expect(elementById('maincontainer').getText()).toContain('Please login');
    done();
  });

timings:
beforeEach browserGet(baseUrl): 6ms
it browserGet(baseUrl): 5ms
it getCurrentUrl() 2ms
it elementById() 3ms
time between beforeEach and afterEach: 10153ms
I wonder what was he doing in all that time.

[juliemr]

Protractor uses promises - so all that the line getCurrentUrl() does is register a promise. The tests themselves actually wait until stuff completes - that's why they're much longer.

[juliemr]

There isn't anything actionable from the issue that's not already captured in #674, so I'm going to go ahead and close. Hope some things were cleared up!

[bitliner]

I did not get the reason why test last much longer in this case. Is there any explanation?

[bestconsultant]

+1

[AntonRand]

@maxtardiveau I have a for loop that does 25 clicks to increment a counter. Just tried your solution on one of my tests and it went from 10 seconds to 2 seconds.

I know I'm probably creating a lot of promises in Protractor with the clicks but that's quite a performance difference!