[Wtr-general] Suite hanging sporadically

[Bret Pettichord]

Lisa Crispin wrote:
> Hi,
> We have a suite of 33 tests with 1474 assertions that takes over 100 
> minutes to run.  I run it every night with --runner=t and -b options.  
> Sometimes it runs just fine, other times it just seems to hang up part 
> way through, it doesn't get an error, it is just sitting there.  This 
> happened to me this morning, and I stopped the testrunner and the 
> traceback shows:
> c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/watir.rb:1383:in 'sleep': interrupt
>            from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/watir.rb:1383:in 'wait'
>            from c:/ruby/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/watir.rb:2014:in 'click'
> then it goes on to point to a line of code in one of our modules which 
> is an ie.button click, which never fails when we run just that script 
> (and normally never fails in the suite, either).
First of all, you should look at that line of watir to see what is 
happening there. I just did that. It is waiting for @ie.busy to be 
false, which  apparently it never will be. In other words, the browser 
is still loading.
> We ran the tests again and they ran with no problem.  I can' t figure 
> out why we're having these sporadic hangings or how to fix them.  The 
> hangup occurs in different places.  I run the suite with nothing else 
> running on the machine.  It's as if watir is dying somehow.  This has 
> happened on a couple of different machines, so I don't think it's the 
> particular machine or installation of watir. 
>
> We have a way to run a much shorter version of the suite; we pass in 
> an option that makes some scripts that would normally loop through 100 
> or more scenarios just do one each, so that it only takes about 10 
> minutes.  This usually works but every now and then it will also get 
> stuck, usually where a script is using autoit to click a modal dialog 
> button.  The scripts never fail when run directly, only sporadically 
> from the suite.  We had a lot of trouble getting that modal dialog 
> problem licked, so that one doesn't surprise me so much, but these 
> hangups in other places do.
>
> How can I run these problems to earth?  This is driving me nuts.  I 
> apologize if this isn't much information, but I'm not sure what to 
> look for.
> thanks
One thing you can do, is add a call to timeout.

Bret