Slowness when running headless Selenium from Jenkins

Question

I've spent about a day looking for solutions around the web to my issue but none work for me.

Here is my scenario:

I am running Selenium scripts with ChromeDriver using pyATS framework on my Ubuntu 18.04 VM. The VM has 4 GB of memory. I also have setup Jenkins on the machine and am trying to run the pyATS script with the pyATS plugin.

When running headless mode from the terminal, the script runs in the same or faster time than non-headless mode. However, when I run in Jenkins on the same machine, I am getting extreme slowdowns. It looks almost as if Jenkins is running my script in sections, with >2 minutes of delay in between steps at random.

I've tried out Xvfb, headless with various chrome options (noproxy, proxy options, gpu disable, etc), increasing heap memory for jenkins, but I always get the same random 2 min of delay in between script steps.

The script doesn't fail - it will complete eventually. But for a step that I expect to take around 2 min, jenkins will take 10 minutes.

I currently don't have a way to increase the memory my VM has, but are there any other solutions that I can try in the meantime?

Answer 1

Found the issue, I had to set the "--proxy-server" for Chrome to the proxy my VM was running behind. For some reason Firefox was working fine without that option so I didn't think to set this option for Chrome.