Experiencing high cpu consumption running Selenium-Server-standalone as a windows service

Question

Thank you for viewing my post.

I'm running selenium-server-standalone as a windows service utilizing nssm(- the Non-Sucking Service Manager | http://nssm.cc/), utilizing the identical process as mentioned in this stackoverflow post @: https://stackoverflow.com/a/10656979/956863. Quick Summary of post: Download and extract nssm.exe Installed NSSM and from the command line ran: nssm install Selenium-Server "C:\Program Files\Java\jre6\bin\java.exe" "-jar C:\Selenium\selenium-server-standalone-2.24.1.jar"

The machine where I'm running this process is running windows XP, service pack 3. This solution to run selenium server as a service works like a charm, and when selenium server is running, and crashes for some reason, selenium server successfully restarts without manual intervention.

But I"m coming into work, and am being informed by system administrators that high cpu alerts are being thrown. And again system logs are providing no information... So I'm wondering if selenium is actually the cause of this issue, and want to eliminate the possibility of running selenium as a service being blamed for this cpu spike.

Can anyone think of a solution, perhaps a way to stop the selenium service when cpu utilization reaches X amount? Or?

In the meantime, I'm going to set some sort of long term CPU utilization monitor and see if that can see something that the system monitor in xp may be missing. ( If anybody knows of a good way to achieve this, i'm open to suggestions as well )

Answer 1

Despite having vague reports of CPU spikes with Selenium as a service, I have yet to see one with my own eyes. Which version of Java are you using?

Our commercial run-anything-as-a-service product supports CPU tracking and can restart Selenium when it hogs the CPU. I suggest that you download the free 30-day trial and use it see if you can confirm or rule out Selenium as the problem in that time frame. Follow this guide to set up Selenium as a service.

Answer 2

I have selenium running as a service on windows 2008 server and noticed that its not able to clean up the headless browser instances. My tests are written in JavaScript with Soda so I have a start up and close out the browser instances but running as a service it doesn't close out those instances in the task manager.

I actually have two ways I'm running the service one way is where I'm using a bat file to run selenium the other way I have it running directly off a registry key.

I was able to fix the browser issue after I just added another step process to teamcity to run taskkill automatically on any browsers left open when the tests were complete. This fixed my CPU spiking issue.