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Telemetry: Diagnosing Test Failures

If you're seeing a test failure on the bots and are unable to diagnose the issue from the test log, here are some steps to help debug the issue.

==Reproducing the Issue==

Determining how Telemetry was invoked

The command line used to invoke Telemetry can be seen when looking at the log for the failing build step, the output is very verbose but if you search for `run_benchmark` you should be able to find it. Look for a command that resembles the following:

/tools/perf/run_benchmark -v --output-format=chartjson --upload-results blink_perf.shadow_dom --browser=reference --output-trace-tag=_ref

Running a Windows VM

Instructions on setting up a Windows VM on a Linux host can be found here (for Googlers only). For how to run it locally on windows, check the instructions here.

Diagnosing on the trybots

Reproducing a failure locally is the most desirable option, both in terms of speed and ease of debugging. If the failure only occurs on a specific OS you don't have access to or if the failure only reproduces on a specific bot you may need to access that bot directly. Information on accessing a trybot remotely can be found here (Internal-only).

You can find the name of the trybot the test is failing on by looking at the "BuildSlave" section of the test run (build58-a1 in the below screenshot):

image

Another option is to use the performance trybots to try a patch with extra diagnostics.

Tips on Diagnosis

Useful Telemetry command line flags

Name Effect
--browser={list,<version>} Change the version of the browser used, list will print all the browsers that Telemetry can see and a browser name will run that browser e.g. --browser=release
--repeat=<N> Repeats the test N times. Note that flaky tests might fail after repetition e.g. --repeat=5
--story-filter=<regex> Only run pages from the pageset that match the given regex, this is useful to make test runs faster if a test only fails on a specific page e.g. --story-filter=flickr
--story-filter-exclude=<regex> Inverse of the above.
-v, -vv Change log level
--show-stdout Show browser stdout
--extra-browser-args= Pass extra arguments when invoking the browser, you can find a useful list of Chrome's command-line arguments here. E.g.: '--extra-browser-args=--enable-logging=stderr --v=2'