Selenium (RC) hangs when started from Python test

Question

Fairly new to Selenium (but loving it). I'm running a single test in Python on Selenium RC. I've been running it multiple times a day for about 3 weeks. Now when I try to run it, it executes all the commands before it's supposed to invoke Selenium, then just hangs. Selenium appears to be running fine (except for this issue). What should I check?

Thanks in advance!

Edit #1

For example, my test begins with:

def setUp(self): 
 os.system("killall firefox") 
 self.verificationErrors = [] 
 print "Starting Selenium..." 
 self.selenium = selenium("localhost", 4444, "*chrome", "http://someaddy.blah.com/") 
 self.selenium.start() 
 print "Selenium Started"</pre></code>

I get:

firefox(2194): Operation not permitted
firefox(10039): Operation not permitted
firefox(23890): Operation not permitted
firefox(26220): Operation not permitted
firefox: no process killed
Starting Selenium...

returned, and it will just hang there indefinitely.

Edit #2

Now it's getting to the same point ("Selenium Started...") and erroring out with BadStatusLine.

• Ivo Grootjes: what version are you using and can you show some code?
• danwoods: Looks like I'm using version 2.0
• Xosler: Why do you kill the firefox before to execute your test in the chrome?

Answer 1

firefox(2194): Operation not permitted

This message indicates that your script has attempted to kill a firefox process that is owned by another user, or has been blocked by something like SELinux. Try running this command as administrator or root before running the tests again.

I would further speculate that the user running the tests is not the same user running Selenium RC.

Suggestions to fix;

1. Stop trying to kill firefox - Selnium RC (Remote Control) isn't always going to run on the same machine as your tests, and in grid setups will even run in parallel. Having to kill firefox manually implies a deeper problem.
2. Kill the firefox processes yourself and ensure the Selenium-server process has been restarted to "clean things up"
3. Run the tests and capture the log from selenium server itself - this will indicate connections being established, browsers starting etc

The "BadStatusLine" is a Python error indicating a problem during communications with a web server and implies to me that the SeleniumServer has gotten into a state where the http responses are getting corrupted. The above steps may help with this.