Freezes during manual tests

Summary:

I can’t reproduce reliably. It started happening sometime in the past few weeks. We wrote about half a dozen integration tests on a new project before it started happening.

I’ll run a test manually, using the UI. It’s a coin-flip whether it freezes or runs smoothly. It will usually freeze when the app is loading initially. It will freeze less often, after the preloading animation, somewhere usually near the beginning of the tests. It will usually complete the test if gets through maybe the first 25% of the test.

It will sometimes freeze for 10s and then unfreeze. This causes the test to fail due to timeout. It usually freezes long enough for me to grow impatient and kill it. I’ll then go back to the cypress UI, select the test, and run it again, and it’s another coin-flip as to whether it gets through.

This is not me doing hundreds of tests. This is freezing when I run one single test. The test clicks a few buttons and fills out a form. The most complicated thing in it is cy.server() and some cy.wait(@example) calls to wait for some web services to return before continuing.

I have not seen the test fail when I do npx cypress run, only when I do npx cypress open.

I’m testing an Angular project, if you think that might be relevant.

Please advise on troubleshooting steps.

Current behavior:

Freezes, about half the time, when tests are run manually through the UI. Causes tests to fail when it unfreezes. Doesn’t always unfreeze.

Desired behavior:

Don’t freeze.

Test code to reproduce

I can not provide a test example for this. Happens with all of my tests now, even very simple ones. Possible that it is something external to Cypress, but I’m not sure what, since my app doesn’t freeze outside of cypress.

Versions

Cypress package version: 3.8.1 Cypress binary version: 3.8.1 Angular 8.2.6 Node: v10.18.0 and v13.6.0 (I just upgraded to see if it fixed the problem. It did not)

[craig-dae]

Summary of issues for anyone else who comes here:

Cypress is freezing on Chrome version 79 when run manually (through the UI). If you have 79, which is the latest version as of today, the problem is Chrome, NOT CYPRESS.

There are two solutions. I prefer the first:

1. Select the Electron browser from within Cypress instead of Chrome
2. Rollback to version 78 of Chrome (link above)

I prefer option 1 because it doesn’t involve rolling back Chrome, which is a huge pain. Also, Chrome had some other weird behavior for me, where it struggled when I tried to reload the app I’m writing.

Thanks Cypress Team (@jennifer-shehane) for your help!

[craig-dae]

Thanks hedge.

Downgraded to 78. I’ve run 3 tests without freezing, and with a noticeable reduction of slugishness.