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Parallel "--by pool" not working, hanging and spamming startup banner

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#5,503 1 comment 1 reaction 0 assignees View on GitHub

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
48/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Quiet
Tech stack
javascript, node.js
Domain
testing-qa

Research direction

Start with the dynamic test-pooling mode described in the linked documentation and trace the worker lifecycle around _finishRun(). Reproduce the hang with Puppeteer and verify that workers exit cleanly and the startup banner is emitted only once rather than for every test assignment.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

stale

We have historically suffered from idle workers due to the wide range of test duration, so when I saw the --by pool mode I thought we'd be able to speed up our tests for free basically ;) (ref: https://codecept.io/parallel/#dynamic-test-pooling-mode)

But it seems to not be working as expected. A couple of issues I noticed:

  1. When I run with pool mode it seems to just hang after a certain amount of time without any clear reason why.

We're using Puppeteer, and my suspicion is that the browser's WebSocket connection keeps the Node event loop alive in the worker thread after the port is closed, so the parent never sees the worker exit and _finishRun() never gets called.

  1. Also, the startup message is fired every time a worker takes a test, so the output gets absolutely hammered which is not ideal for CI

e.g. (example output)

CodeceptJS v3.7.7 #StandWithUkraine
Running tests in 1 workers...

CodeceptJS v3.7.7 #StandWithUkraine
Using test root "/home/user/project"

Login suite --
[Worker 01]   ✔ Login suite › User can log in in 3401ms
  ✔ User can log in in 3401ms

  OK  | 1 passed   // 4s
CodeceptJS v3.7.7 #StandWithUkraine
Using test root "/home/user/project"

Login suite --
[Worker 01]   ✔ Login suite › User sees error on bad credentials in 2980ms
  ✔ User sees error on bad credentials in 2980ms

  OK  | 2 passed   // 8s
CodeceptJS v3.7.7 #StandWithUkraine
Using test root "/home/user/project"
...
Dominant language
JavaScript
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Forks
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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