Limiting the timeout period for Selenium FindElement()

Question

How can I limit/reduce the timeout period for FindElement? I am scraping a website. For a table which appears in thousands of pages, I can have either an element stating there is no information, or the table. I search for one of theses elements and when missing, I search for the other. The problem is that when one of them does not exist, it takes a long time until the FindElement times out. Can this period be shortened? Can the timeout period be defined per element? All I found about waits are to prolong the timeout period... I'm working in a .NET environment, if that helps.

Answer 1

The delay in FindElement is caused by the Implicit Wait settings. You can set it temporary to different value

driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(0)); // setting to 0 will check one time only when using FindElement

// look for the elements

driver.Manage().Timeouts().ImplicitlyWait(TimeSpan.FromSeconds(original settings));