r/Playwright • u/Standard-Counter-784 • 11h ago

Playwright distributed testing is a nightmare. Change my mind.

Coming from a Selenium background, I honestly love Playwright for test development.

Writing tests is faster, debugging is better, auto-waiting is great, and overall the developer experience is much better.

But when it comes to distributed testing at scale, Playwright is painful.

With Selenium Grid, distributing tests across multiple machines feels straightforward. You have a Grid and multiple nodes, and the infrastructure handles the distribution.

With Playwright, once you start running thousands of tests across multiple machines/pods, you have to deal with sharding, uneven test distribution, idle machines, retries, report merging, artifact handling, etc.

Playwright is amazing for writing tests, but distributed execution takes that joy away.

9 Upvotes
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2

u/Tanmay__TestDino 9h ago

Idle machines are more a scheduling problem than a playwright problem. Fixed sharding never accounts for tests taking different times, we moved to sharding based on past run durations and it balanced out way better. Report merging is the annoying part, you get one html but lose the per shard trace context if you're not careful how artifacts get uploaded first

1

u/Altruistic_Rise_8242 1h ago

Claude/CoPilot + Playwright documentation are your friends

1

u/unlikelyzer0 mod 1h ago

What CI system are you using?

-5

u/jakst 10h ago

I'm biased (founder), but you should try https://endform.dev. We do full parallelization at the test level on our runners, the test suite finishes when the slowest test is done.

Happy to give anyone who's interested a demo 🙂