Improving performance in a Webdriver method

I'm testing an application which is not exactly an e-commerce application but which behaves enough like one that you can think of it as an e-commerce application for the purposes of understanding this code :)

This code relies heavily on the Selenium Webdriver library.

The code comes from the Product page, where you have searched and found a list of products. This is a utility method to get the list of products being displayed so I can verify correctness along any axis. This method only gets those products that are visible, which may differ from the total list of products if filtering is involved.

I maintain a list of WebElements representing the container for the product display, one for each product on the page, which is initialized in initLists() (along with some other non-important lists) so that we don't have stale references. That's what's stored in allProducts.

ProductView is an inner class that encapsulates a specific Product record in the list; interactions with a given product (such as clicking any of the links for more information) are delegated to the ProductView for that Product.

public ArrayList getAllVisibleProducts() {
    initLists(); //Reinitialize lists

    Utils.WaitForAjax(driver);
    ArrayList retval = new ArrayList();
    for (WebElement rProduct : allProducts) {
        try {
            if (rProduct.isDisplayed()) retval.add(new ProductView(rProduct).getProduct());
        } catch (StaleElementReferenceException e) {
            continue; //We just ignore that element
        }
    }
    return retval;
}

I'm getting hangs of sometimes multiple minutes where the test appears to do nothing on the product page. I'm currently still trying to reproduce the super-long lag, but at least part of my problem is that this method takes quite a long time to return. I put log statements at various portions of the app, and between starting the loop and returning, it was something like 44 seconds for 8 products. Am I doing to

Bunch of small things not related to your performance problem:

• Utils.WaitForAjax should be Utils.waitForAjax. Methods in Java should start with a lower letter.

• Don't return ArrayList; it's an implementation. You should use the interface List. The day you want to change to a LinkedList, it will be easier.

• I recommend to always use {} for if, even if you only have just one line. But that is up to you.

• I like to name ignoredException an exception that I'm ignoring. Make it more clear.

By looking at your code, I can only guess that your performance bottleneck probably is new ProductView(rProduct) or rProduct.isDisplayed(). If in ProductView you're scraping the page, it could take a lot of time depending on the driver and the method you're doing it.

But with the code you're showing us right now, there is nothing particularly wrong.

StackExchange Code Review Q#63256, answer score: 3