Winappdriver: SendKeys is incredibly slow on a WinForms app

[bgavrilMS]

I'm writing a few lines of text to a multi-line text box on a WinForms app. This takes a very long time, as the pauses between each key press are long. It seems to be ~5 times slower than typing the exact same string into an Android device.

Is there any way to set the text faster ? I am not interested in simulating an actual user, so actually setting the whole string at once would be ok.

[yodurr]

I've noticed this as well, marking as a bug for us to investigate. Thanks.

[mjcheetham]

Do we have an update on this issue? Is there a roadmap to support a different sendKeyStrategy?

[mjcheetham]

Looking at this some more, it takes approximately 100 ms per extra key stroke that is entered (with an initial overhead of ~225 ms).

It's as if there is an intentional sleep/wait of 50–100ms with each key stroke. If this is true could this not be configurable as a capability? Typing a 100 character long string can take >10 seconds where as on iOS and Android this takes less than 2 seconds to type.

Our tests which run on Windows take much longer to run largely because of this!

Sample timing code

// element is "Text Editor" element of notepad.exe
var stopwatch = new Stopwatch();
for (var i = 1; i < 50; i++)
{
    stopwatch.Restart();
    element.SendKeys(new string('.', i));
    timings.Add(i, stopwatch.Elapsed);
}
stopwatch.Stop();

Results (click to expand)

Length  Time /ms

1        324.3621

2        426.4828

3        526.5173

4        625.7351

5        731.2946

6        832.9059

7        939.4098

8       1042.0187

9       1141.0083

10      1237.2658

11      1340.3266

12      1444.7836

13      1545.7972

14      1649.2756

15      1745.3433

16      1847.0165

17      1955.1851

18      2048.8625

19      2147.1372

20      2252.4429

21      2352.5703

22      2456.1842

23      2557.2057

24      2657.7625

25      2760.5310

26      2861.5971

27      2955.2763

28      3058.7034

29      3160.2129

30      3269.7398

31      3366.3996

32      3469.3434

33      3570.7307

34      3666.7676

35      3767.4056

36      3869.9400

37      3971.6589

38      4069.4574

39      4175.2876

40      4279.8255

41      4378.7431

42      4476.8069

43      4579.4885

44      4680.3207

45      4783.8319

46      4882.2591

47      4974.5354

48      5077.6845

49      5183.5658

[timotiusmargo]

We recently made an improvement on typing and clicking input performance in v1.0-RC2 release. Would you please give it a try?

[rmlira]

Still facing this problem in release 1.1

[xenomuta]

+1

[Anya-Usatenco]

+1

[adubry75]

it's not just WinForms, it's SendKeys in general, even in Notepad it's incredibly slow. It should be as fast as a copy/paste operation, not normal human typing speed, imo. AutoIt seems more instantaneous. Is there no way to "Paste" a string into a textbox, is SendKeys the only way? Thanks!