Python client has to check for a still active keep-alive connection before sending the command

[whimboo]

Meta -

OS: All

Selenium Version: 3.13.0

Browser: Firefox

Browser Version: All versions of Firefox

Since the release of geckodriver version 0.21.0 the keep-alive mode is supported, with the caveat (mozilla/geckodriver#1304) that the timeout on the server side is set to only 5s. As result any command will fail which is send after a time.sleep() larger or equal to 5s. Here an example:

    driver.get("http://example.org")
    time.sleep(6)
    driver.find_element_by_tag_name("h1")

Expected Behavior -

The Selenium client has to check for a valid and active connection before sending the request. It shouldn't result in an exception as shown below.

Actual Behavior -

The next command after the 5s delay will fail with:

../../Users/henrik/.venvs/selenium/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py:635: in execute_script
    'args': converted_args})['value']
../../Users/henrik/.venvs/selenium/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/webdriver.py:318: in execute
    response = self.command_executor.execute(driver_command, params)
../../Users/henrik/.venvs/selenium/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/remote_connection.py:472: in execute
    return self._request(command_info[0], url, body=data)
../../Users/henrik/.venvs/selenium/lib/python2.7/site-packages/selenium/webdriver/remote/remote_connection.py:496: in _request
    resp = self._conn.getresponse()
/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12_2/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/httplib.py:1136: in getresponse
    response.begin()
/usr/local/Cellar/python/2.7.12_2/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/lib/python2.7/httplib.py:453: in begin
    version, status, reason = self._read_status()
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

self = <httplib.HTTPResponse instance at 0x10745d680>

    def _read_status(self):
        # Initialize with Simple-Response defaults
        line = self.fp.readline(_MAXLINE + 1)
        if len(line) > _MAXLINE:
            raise LineTooLong("header line")
        if self.debuglevel > 0:
            print "reply:", repr(line)
        if not line:
            # Presumably, the server closed the connection before
            # sending a valid response.
>           raise BadStatusLine(line)
E           BadStatusLine: ''

[whimboo]

@AutomatedTester can you please have a look? It would be good to also have such a test in the Selenium test suite.

[Ivru]

As a workaround, for the moment, I force the webdriver not to use keep_alive connection.
ie :
selenium/webdriver/firefox/webdriver.py line 165
executor = FirefoxRemoteConnection(remote_server_addr=self.service.service_url, keep_alive=False)

[whimboo]

I know that @AutomatedTester rewrote that part of the Python bindings to make use of urllib3, but the patch doesn't seem to have landed yet. David, can you please give us an update?

[lmtierney]

PR is currently under review #6103

[AutomatedTester]

as there is a PR no need to keep a bug too