Cypress starts lagging after a test triggers `screenshotOnRunFailure: true`

[nazar]

Current behavior

We've started observing this recently, possibly after updating our CI/CD NodeJS to version 24.13.1 but I cannot rule it if this is related or not.

We are seeing severe slowdowns in a suite after a test fails and is retried. The slowdown is not observed after the first retry but is reproducible after the second retry. To clarify, all tests are retried once with retries: 1.

The same tests after they were fixed to not require a retry:

Note how tests that take 8s to run now take over ten times longer to complete, in some examples this goes from 8 seconds to 111 seconds.

This makes the retries feature not very useful since a test suite that takes 15 minutes to complete now take nearly two hours to complete after a couple of retries.

Configs:

defineConfig({
  viewportWidth: 1400,
  viewportHeight: 900,
  numTestsKeptInMemory: 1,
  retries: {
    runMode: 1,
    openMode: 0
  },
  video: false,
  screenshotOnRunFailure: true,
  execTimeout: 10000,
  pageLoadTimeout: 10000,
  responseTimeout: 30000,
  taskTimeout: 60000
})

node --version
v24.13.1

These tests run on AWS EC2 Amazon Linux 2023 on c8a.xlarge instances with gp3 EBS 3000 IOPS drives and a run via cypress run.

Is anybody else seeing something similar to this?

Please let me know if I can provide any further details.

Desired behavior

Subsequent tests should not slow down after a failed test is retried.

Test code to reproduce

NA

Cypress Version

15.12.0

Debug Logs

Attempting to get these....

Other

No response

[nazar]

Early testing seems to point to the { screenshotOnRunFailure: true } option. Setting retries to 0 did not improve this as severe slow downs were seen after a test failure.

Disabling screenshots via { screenshotOnRunFailure: false } seems to have fixed the issue for us.

For reference, our CI/CD runs Cypress inside Docker via the following compose:

  e2e:
    image: public.ecr.aws/cypress-io/cypress/base:24.13.1
    ipc: host # https://github.com/cypress-io/cypress/issues/350
    volumes:
      - ./e2e/screenshots:/opt/app/cypress/screenshots