[naasking]

> - Hard-coded waits in your code, like "Thread.sleep(1000)". A better alternative is to replace hard-coded waits with something that waits for an element or value to appear on the page.

We don't do any timed waits, all of our waits are for an element or value to appear, but these waits never complete sometimes, non-deterministically. We then added a long 5 min timeout on these waits because we know the test will never complete at that point. It's always fine in manual testing though, and if we don't run the browser in headless mode and watch it work. Very frustrating.

Sometimes the HTTP requests themselves timeout after a few minutes, but this never happens in manual testing either. That's actually the most common issue these days, and this happens non-deterministically too. This is what I meant by "flaky".

[tmcneal]

I wonder if the infrastructure that's driving the browser tests is underpowered. If the browser process is dying silently or CPU is getting maxed out, it could manifest in what you're describing where it happens intermittently and there's very little to go on. I'm assuming you're running these tests in Chrome... You could check the Chrome debug logs to see if anything is being spit out there.

[ethbr0]

Does Selenium have a trace log generator that will dump out all events? I.e. all element creation on the page, matching, etc.

I'm not familiar with it specifically, but that's my go-to starting place in weird automation issues like that. Normally it gives some kind of hint as to why that's happening (or why Selenium thinks it's happening).