Does Selenium implicit wait always take the entire wait time or can it finish sooner?

Question

Does Selenium implicit wait always take the entire wait time or can it finish sooner? If I set the implicit wait to 10 seconds, could a call to .findElement finish in a few

Answer 1

It can finish once it was able to find the element. If not it does throws the error and stops. The poll time is again very specific to the driver implementation ( not Java bindings , but the driver part, example: FireFox extension, Safari Extension etc.)

As I have mentioned here, these are very specific to the driver implementation. All driver related calls goes via execute method.

I'm putting up the gist over of the execute method (you can find the full source here):

protected Response execute(String driverCommand, Map parameters) {
    Command command = new Command(sessionId, driverCommand, parameters);
    Response response;

    long start = System.currentTimeMillis();
    String currentName = Thread.currentThread().getName();
    Thread.currentThread().setName(
        String.format("Forwarding %s on session %s to remote", driverCommand, sessionId));
    try {
      log(sessionId, command.getName(), command, When.BEFORE);
      response = executor.execute(command);
      log(sessionId, command.getName(), command, When.AFTER);

      if (response == null) {
        return null;
      }
      //other codes 
}

The line:

response = executor.execute(command);

says the whole story. executor is of type CommandExecutor, so all calls goes to the specific driver class like ChromeCommandExecutor,SafariDriverCommandExecutor, which has their own handling.

So the polling is upto the driver implementation.

If you want to specify the polling time, then you should probably start using Explicit Waits.