Hi bb_tester. You have a very good point. As of right now, the test is always running on my personal development machine, though we are already working on building a "spider/bot environment". This will minimize the possibility that another process is taking over or killing our process, but I haven't ruled out that possibility yet. Currently my Spider is a scheduled task, which runs every evening after I leave work. If I happen to know I'll be working later, then I reschedule the Spider to run at a different time. Because I am running it on my personal development machine, I try and close as many programs as I don't need before I leave for the day, including popup blockers, IM, Email, and various quick launchers I have running on my system. The only system tray programs I leave running are my antivirus, VPN, and sound controls. None of these systems "should" affect the way such a program as a Spider performs, but it may be possible. As of yet I haven't decided to coll ect perfomance stats. As I watch my little Spider program run I don't usually see anything out of the ordinary, except for example, when the page I am on contains several hundred images and I am checking each image. One page of ours contains over 1,000 separate images, and during the time it is checking those images there is much higher CPU usage (upwards of 100%). This doesn't really concern me though, because all I am doing is querying the RPC server (Internet Explorer) to find out each image's file size. I have seen IE use 100% CPU and 400,000 KB of Memory and not give me any trouble, though they may signify some kind of memory leak in our web application. I described this somewhat in another thread, where I mentioned our website having a problem at one time, where a certain section of our website would crash IE after a few clicks. This was caused by a line of CSS not being released by IE, and building up memory usage, which was a leak in our software (the ASPX web app we created) and not Internet Explorer. I am convinced, though clumsy it may be, that IE is very robust and can handle anything it's built for, so web app and web site developers need to be very careful to do things the "right" way. This may be the reason IE is closing on me. I plan now to run at least one test to include memory data from task manager - I have written an external, low-level screenshot program using C#.Net to take the place of the clumsier, less reliable method that Watir 1.4 uses - sending keystrokes and using Paint to save the file -, and it allows me to take a screenshot of either just my browser or the whole screen. For now I believe this will be sufficient.
Thank you for your time bb_tester. Nathan --------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted via Jive Forums http://forums.openqa.org/thread.jspa?threadID=5183&messageID=14535#14535 _______________________________________________ Wtr-general mailing list [email protected] http://rubyforge.org/mailman/listinfo/wtr-general
