title: Why is Selenium RC so slow?
body: <p>For some time I have been investigating Selenium RC in order to do functional testing of my web application. I have now found a test strategy that is so effective, that I do not want to move away from Selenium RC (after spending weeks trying to figure out a good way to validate ASP.NET validation controls).</p>
  
  <p>But now that my Selenium RC adventure is moving from a POC to be something that I actually use, I'm running into a problem. It is insanely slow. Executing a single test that loads a page, fills in some fields, and clicks a button takes in the magnitude of seconds to execute. When it is executing, I can easily see each individual field being filled out one at a time. Using Selenium IDE in Firefox is not that slow.</p>
  
  <p>I found this page, that clearly specifies that Selenium RC is slow <a href="http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/how_it_works.html" rel="noreferrer">http://selenium-grid.seleniumhq.org/how_it_works.html</a></p>
  
  <p>But why is that? Is it because the browser is polling the selenium server? If so, can this polling interval not be modified? Or is there another reason. I am not accustomed to a remote call taking a humanly noticable amount of time to execute.</p>
  
  <p>It is horrible that executing a few tests should take so long. I can execute my entire presentation (MVP), business, and database layer test suite (500+ tests) way quicker than it takes to run 10 tests for a single web page.</p>