Directing traffic to Selenium nodes

Now that the Selenium Grid nodes are set up and running, there are several ways to direct traffic to them. In most cases, there will be nodes set up on the grid dedicated to a specific platform and browser or mobile device version, but there are other scenarios that will crop up. Let's discuss a few of them here before we move onto third-party grids.

Multiple nodes of the same platform and version

Say you do most of your testing on a particular platform, browser, or mobile device. You can set up a virtual grid node that has multiple instances of that platform, browser, and device. But, after 5-10 instances, the virtual machine may run out of memory.

So, you could clone the VM, create a second identical node on the grid, and let the Selenium hub load balance the tests that get started and run on that particular platform.

The Selenium hub keeps track of which nodes are idle, and once a node has the max number of instances running on it, the hub will either add...