Chrome V86: RPA running slowly ignoring !ReplaySpeed [Solved]

It’s an important problem to solve because it’s too sloow in this mode.

waiting admin for suggestions

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I had just encountered the same problem.

But I fixed this by moving the ui vision window to the taskbar area (some part of the ui vision window is being overlapped with the taskbar … and that mean ui vision is still active and make the script run smoothly, not slow).

I also create a few commands to minimize and maximize window size automatically by XType ({KEY_WIN+KEY_UP} / {KEY_WIN+KEY_DOWN})

This should help skip this problem for now. But it would be better, to fix the bug from UI Vision.

This is a big problem for us too. Please fix as soon as possible! Thank you

We confirmed the problem. This issue is triggered by the most recent Chrome update V86. All still works fine with Chrome V85 and of course in Firefox and Edge.

From the web: Chrome V86 adds background throttling to manage the effect of your tabs. It promises to reduce the maximum load of all the tabs you aren’t looking at to a mere one percent of your CPU. These tabs have to be inactive for at least five minutes for the throttling to kick in.

At this point I am not sure if this description is correct. In my test the effect of bringing the RPA window to the background is immediately, no five minutes grace period. Also, I have not found a flag to disable it. The (old) #intensive-wake-up-throttling flag sounds good, but does not influence this new behavior.

Test:

  1. RPA window not in foreground, but not completely covered => fast

  2. RPA window completely in background (browser full screen) => slow

  3. Browser full screen, but RPA window on top, in the corner => fast

We are looking into this further. Meanwhile there are some good workarounds:

  • Make sure a tiny bit of the RPA window is still visible. This avoids the throttling.

  • Or use our RPA software for Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Edge. These browsers do not show the background throttling behavior. Your macros run in all 3 browsers without changes.

image

Test screencast:

PS: I will mark this workaround as solution for now. But we continue to search for a direct solution.

Thanks for looking into this so quickly @admin. I’m afraid those proposed workarounds aren’t suitable for us as we have a huge number of automated scripts running from batch files as scheduled tasks, which would be too complicated to switch to a new browser. We’d really appreciate a quick solution for this one! Thank you.

May I ask why this would be difficult? I assume you use the command line API? If you have Firefox and/or Edge installed and use hard-drive mode, the switch to a different RPA browser can be as easy as changing the path to the browser. For example see this Powershell script:

That’s very helpful @admin, thank you! You’re right, we could look at updating the paths to Firefox in our batch files. I’d ideally like this working in Chrome though, as we have a lot of scripts which I’d need to retest in Firefox to make sure that everything works correctly, which would be time consuming. Thanks for your help.

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Actually, if you want to replace Chrome without worrying about a changed website behavior in the new browser, then I recommend Edge, since it uses a Chromium engine inside. Whereas Firefox has its own rendering engine (Gecko).

The overall Edge browser behavior (internal timings, load times, Javascript handling, PDF support,…) is very close to Edge. Edge is available for Mac and Windows but not yet for Linux (planned).

Also, RPA for Edge and RPA for Chrome share 100% the same source code. But RPA for Firefox has a few places where we needed to add Firefox specific solutions. => Thus Edge is the best direct replacement for Chrome.

@admin Thank you. Could you please confirm that you’re working on a Chrome solution for this? It’s proving to be very time consuming to switch everything to different browsers and retest everything.

Confirmed. We have a few ideas on how to solve this!

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I am happy to report that we found a very good solution for this issue. The Chrome slowdown issue is solved. => We will release an update with this fix ASAP.

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Fixed with the V5.9.3 release. Thanks again for the very helpful error reporting!

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