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Aerlock's avatar
Aerlock
Occasional Contributor
9 years ago

Internet Explorer is becoming non-responsive

I have a relatively small test suite (60-80 tests) that we run nightly on a VM. Sometimes when this suite runs IE stops responding to Test complete and all the subsequent tests fail. When this happens the tests run but cannot find any objects to interact with. After the tests IE is just left up and running on the VM on the default home page. This is IE 11 and it should be all up to date. If it makes a difference the tests are being written in TestComplete 11.20 and run in Test Execute 11.20.

 

Any help on how to fix this would be appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Aerlock

  • chrisb's avatar
    chrisb
    Regular Contributor

    I have a very similar issue. We are running our tests in IE11 using TC 11.20 on virtual machines. After about 1 hour into the test run there are a particular set of controls that stop responding.

     

    I fixed the issue by writing a small script that logs out of our application, kills all IE processes, then restarts browser and logs in. This script runs about every ten tests in our test run (approximately every 30 minutes). 

     

    I suspect this is a memory leak issue in IE and or Test Execute but would require some more in depth troubleshooting. I did try running IE developer tools 'Memory' feature to watch memory usage while tests were running in real time and it does climb contunously during my test run and fairly high. I would assume to the point where my application eventually becomes non responsive. 

     

    I also came accross someone reporting a similar issue with Selenium tests (after a Google search for issue) and they resolved by restarting the browser perididocially so I suspect this may not be an issue exclusive to Test Complete. 

     

    I have a ticket open with SmartBear but no response yet, perhaps you can also open a ticket if you havent done so already?

  • chrisb's avatar
    chrisb
    Regular Contributor

    You might also want to check that your VM's exceed the minimum system requirements for Test Complete. This gave a slight performance improvement on my test hosts but didnt resolve the issue we are discussing. 

  • djadhav's avatar
    djadhav
    Regular Contributor

    I am not sure if you're doing this but if not, it should help.

     

    One of the best practices for testing web applications in a  browser is that after every test case, the browser should be restarted (to ensure proper initliazation of the browser state and prevent interference between test cases). I do that for all my test suites and the browsers perform as expected.

    • Aerlock's avatar
      Aerlock
      Occasional Contributor

       

      djadhav wrote:

      I am not sure if you're doing this but if not, it should help.

       

      One of the best practices for testing web applications in a  browser is that after every test case, the browser should be restarted (to ensure proper initliazation of the browser state and prevent interference between test cases). I do that for all my test suites and the browsers perform as expected.


      That is what I was doing already. Switching to reusing the same window seems to have resolved the issue. I'm not 100% sure that it is working this way because the suite has only been run a few times since I made the change yesterday. I also found references to a patch to address a memory issue in IE and other browsers. I have the patch but haven't applied it yet.

  • This is definitely a thing that I've been fighting for a while now. There's some kind of memory leak in IE that doesn't occur when running the same test in Firefox. Luckily, we've been able to just run in FF instead of IE. I have run into a situation where FF memory skyrockets (over 2gb virtual memory consumed by the process), but that seems to be tied to a specific sequence in our app.

    • chrisb's avatar
      chrisb
      Regular Contributor

      There was an issue reported with IE 11 recently

       

      http://stackoverflow.com/questions/33260872/ie-11-update-version-11-0-24-memory-consumption-issue

       

      This didnt help me as I am running version 11, build 11.0.9600.18163, switching off the spellchecker plugin made no difference.

       

      I did find that running through the same test steps manually in IE causes the memory usage to balloon as quickly as when running Test Execute, so the issue is in IE or our web app.

       

      If anyone has any tips or can point to good online resources for debugging memory issues in IE that would be great.