github-action: Videos don't seem to work on GitHub Action default runners
Context
Bug report regarding videos on GitHub Actions default runners.
Steps
I have just set up cypress for my repository.
Everything seems to be set up correctly, and yarn cypress run yields a video that works.
Now I’d like to reproduce this in CI, and created a workflow with the same settings apart from the URL:
Relevant part of the workflow
- name: Run Cypress 🌲
uses: cypress-io/github-action@v2
env:
CYPRESS_BASE_URL: ${{ github.event.deployment_status.target_url }}
- name: Upload video 📼
uses: actions/upload-artifact@v2
if: always()
with:
name: Test videos
path: cypress/videos
retention-days: 14
I’m using default ubuntu-latest runner with default settings.
** Results**
The tests run fine (all 91 succeed as expected) and the video uploads. However the video cuts out after a few seconds. Only the last frame is updated to show the tests. Presumably because the machine runs out of resources while loading the page.
Video artifact
Video file
Screenshot of last frame
Related
I believe that most reports here are also related to this issue.
About this issue
- Original URL
- State: closed
- Created 2 years ago
- Reactions: 13
- Comments: 18 (11 by maintainers)
I’m experiencing the same thing.
Great, I have requested access to the new larger GitHub Actions runners for installation to our organization and will try the videos on a 4-core runner. I’ll report back here with what I find.
For me it doesn’t matter too much if it goes slower, as long as it works. Is there no way to throttle the tests more in order to get the video to work somehow?
Personally I don’t feel disabling video entirely is a good solution to this issue.
Ok, finally got a chance to try GitHub Actions larger runners out and it seems that it still freezes / stutters multiple times on a 4-core runner with 16GB RAM (Ubuntu). This is with
cypress@11.0.1.The 8-core / 32GB RAM runner produced almost smooth videos (stuttered a bit at the beginning).
Wonder if anything else can be done on Cypress’ side to make it more efficient.
cc @admah @jennifer-shehane
This is a CPU issue. There is not enough CPU to run Cypress, record video and whatever else is running in the GHA. Default CPU for GHA: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/using-github-hosted-runners/about-github-hosted-runners#supported-runners-and-hardware-resources
CPU Recommendations:
https://docs.cypress.io/guides/guides/screenshots-and-videos#Videos
FWIW the GitHub runners’ CPUs are terribly slow, and disabling videos entirely was a big performance gain for me (about 50%). While videos are very valuable, the massive run time reduction was worth it for me. It also made my tests less flaky, as there are fewer timeouts.
This CPU bottleneck might also be why Cypress has a hard time recording and encoding the videos.
https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/161 is scheduled for Q1 of this year, hopefully this will make Cypress videos viable.