Playwright / Scenario
Parallel Meltdown at Worker Four
workers: 1 is green. workers: 4 is a crime scene: carts with ghost items and sessions dying mid-test. One shared account, four simultaneous suspects.
- Difficulty
- Hard
- Format
- Scenario
- Points
- 200
- Estimate
- 15 min
// MISSION BRIEF
Your Mission
To cut CI from 38 to 11 minutes, the team flipped workers: 4. Since then: random cart-count failures, mid-test logouts, and one engineer campaigning to "just go back to workers: 1 forever."
The failure roster and the fixture file tell the real story. Diagnose the sharing, fix it properly, and veto the fake fixes.
Decisions are weighted.
// FIRST CONTACT
Battle teaser
First artifact
Failure roster (last 5 CI runs, workers: 4)
Root cause of the cart and wishlist failures:
- APlaywright's cart badge locator has a race condition
- BThe staging database is simply too slow
- CFour workers mutate one shared server-side account concurrently: each test sees the others' cart items and wishlist rows
- Dworkers: 4 exceeds what Chromium supports
Answers, scoring, hints, and the full battle stay sealed.
// SKILL TAGS
playwrightparallelismtest-isolationfixturesci-cd