Improve Selenium Performance

At TestingBot, we like our users to profit from fast access to our VMs.

In our manual testing area, we provide a way to pick an Operating System, Browser and browser version. As soon as you picked a combination you'd like to use, we spin up a Virtual Machine, which is a virtual computer in our cloud system. This computer is fresh, not used by anyone before you and will not be used by anyone after you. As soon as you close the manual test session, the computer and all its data is destroyed.

To keep this entire process very fast, we do various things:

• We start the virtual machine with its RAM memory already loaded, meaning we can skip the entire boot process. Booting up a computer takes a couple of minutes, by eliminating this, we can provide you with a fresh computer on the fly.
• For Windows testing, we use the very fast RDP protocol to provide remote desktop. RDP is created by Microsoft and works very fast with Windows.
• Contrary to our competitors, we stream these RDP packets immediately to your browser, by using FreeRDP and Guacamole. This means less lag during your test session, fast and responsive mouse to control our computers in your browser.
• We utilize websockets to transfer data between our cloud and your browser, which means realtime data transfer instead of polling for data, which is much slower.
• Our MAC/Linux/Android machines are equipped with an optimised VNC server which will first compress data and keep the transferred data to a minimum. This keeps your manual test session responsive.
• The machines are equipped with a lot of RAM and a fast CPU, which means the manual test will not be slow due to slow computer speed, browser speed or any other bottleneck.

We're constantly working on improving our system to keep everything very fast.