Why is Selenium InternetExplorerDriver Webdriver very slow in debug mode (visual studio 2010 and IE9)

Question

I'm using the example code from the SeleniumHq site - but in debug mode the performance is awful. In release mode, the entire test takes about 6 seconds (including launching and closing IE) In Debug mode it takes 65 seconds?

The sample code is just :

    [Test]

    public void testBrowser()

    {

        // Do something here

        IWebDriver driver = new InternetExplorerDriver();

        //Notice navigation is slightly different than the Java version

        //This is because 'get' is a keyword in C#

        driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("http://www.google.com");

        IWebElement query = driver.FindElement(By.Name("q"));

        query.SendKeys("Cheese");

        System.Console.WriteLine("Page title is: " + driver.Title);

        // TODO add wait

        driver.Quit();

    }

I've tried it in ie8 and have the same performance. Firefox is fine - but my clients use IE so I'm stuck with testing against it. Also - I don't have the same issues if I use Selenium RC.

NB - I'm using .Net 4 and the latest version (2.16) of the webDriver.dll (running on a 64bit windows 7 box) 

Answer 1

For me, the fix was to switch to the 32-bit version of InternetExplorerDriver.exe IEDriverServer can be found here: https://www.seleniumhq.org/download/

Seemingly named IEDriverServer these days, but works fine if you simply rename it to InternetExplorerDriver.exe