Every Playwright job spent a flat 90s on `npx playwright install ffmpeg`,
and none of them ended up with a usable ffmpeg.
The 2.3MB download finishes in under a second; extraction then hangs until
`timeout -k 10 90` reaps it (exit 124, masked by `continue-on-error`). That
is a Node 24.16.0 readable-stream change (nodejs/node#62557) colliding with
yauzl/fd-slicer never firing `close` after EOF, which hangs extract-zip.
It leaves a truncated `ffmpeg-linux` — 5,055,201 bytes against the zip's
declared 5,101,056, segfaulting on exec — and no INSTALLATION_COMPLETE
marker, so Playwright treated ffmpeg as uninstalled. `video: 'on-first-retry'`
has therefore never worked in CI, and every first retry of a flaky test died
in browserContext.newPage: exactly the failure the step existed to prevent.
Upstream fixed it in Playwright 1.60.0 (microsoft/playwright#40747) and Node
reverted it in 24.18.0 (nodejs/node#63834). Node 24.16.0 is pinned in 17
places including the Dockerfiles, so bump Playwright instead — it is a dev
dependency, and `^1.56.1` already permitted 1.62.1; only the lockfile pinned
it. Staying at or above 1.62.1 also avoids the tsconfig-resolution
regressions in 1.62.0.
Caching alone could not have fixed this: a cold cache still hangs, and what
would have been cached is the corrupt binary. So the ffmpeg download is now
restored from cache keyed on the resolved playwright-core version, the
install is skipped outright on a hit, and the cache is only saved once the
binary is verified to actually execute — a partial extraction can never be
promoted into a cache that every later job restores.
Per job: 90s to ~0s on a hit, ~2s on a miss.
`npx playwright install-deps chrome` is the third-most-common e2e failure:
three of the last twenty-five Playwright runs died on it, taking the whole
aggregate gate with them. The step is not installing anything CI needs.
The runner's Chrome is an apt package, so apt has already satisfied every
library Playwright lists — the log shows each one "already the newest version".
All `install-deps` adds are decorative CJK/Thai/Cyrillic font packages, ~21MB
pulled from azure.archive.ubuntu.com by seven jobs on every PR. No CI assertion
depends on them: the only spec that screenshots gates its comparison behind
`E2E_VISUAL_SNAPSHOTS`, which no workflow sets, and no baselines are committed.
Keep the install, but demote it. `google-chrome --version` becomes its own
fatal step so a genuinely missing browser still fails loudly and immediately,
while the font install retries with a per-attempt cap and degrades to a warning.
The Redis install in the list_changed job stays fatal — that one is required.
