topic Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow in Product Forum

MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Wed, 22 May 2024 08:33:02 GMT

Hi,

We have been experiencing a big issue with our robots running on Microsoft Edge. Initially, all robots were operating smoothly, but recently, the time taken to handle tasks has increased significantly.

For example, the usual time to locate an element on the page (such as during a wait stage or navigate stage) was less than 1 second. Now, it can take up to 1-2 minutes. Cases that normally are completed within 2 minutes, now take up to 17 minutes to be completed which impacts everything.

We suspected 1 month ago that an Edge update was the cause and attempted a rollback, which appeared to resolve the issue temporarily. However, the problem resurfaced yesterday without any new updates to Edge.

There have been no changes to our resources, Edge version, or the robots themselves. Additionally, there is space available in the database. (BP Version 6.10.5)

Has anyone else encountered a similar issue?

Thank you for your assistance.

Kind regards,

Osman

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Mohamad_Dakkouri — Wed, 22 May 2024 09:17:31 GMT

Hi @osmandvci

We had pretty much the same problem in the past, but it didn't take as much time as you did. We updated Edge, We cleared the cache (see image below) and restarted the VMs before each launch and it worked. I hope it works for you too

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Wed, 22 May 2024 10:12:40 GMT

Hi @Mohamad_Dakkouri ,

Thanks for your quick reply. All browser/cache data are already deleted each time the browser is closed and I tested on a VM with the latest Edge version. Also I just checked the settings, there is less than 1 MB of cache data.

I think the issue lies somewhere else 😞

Thanks anyway for replying!

Kind regards,

Osman

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

expertcr — Wed, 22 May 2024 13:04:54 GMT

I recommend you review the following KB Article: "What are the key considerations when working with Modern Browser Automations on BP version 6.X?"

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Kirk.Russell — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:08:49 GMT

Hi Osman

I got something similar recently - it seemed to be where a process carries out an action that resulted in another tab being opened by the application and then needing to return to the original tab after some actions. The switching back and forth between tabs sometimes just took a long time to recognise the active tab to attach/activate.

I am using the old standard of object builds with an init page running through attach/activate attempts. It seemed to be the problem was activating and taking over a minute to work out which page to activate. Initially I thought the Main page win 32 spy was wrong but it wasn't it just seems to take a long time to recognise sometimes in newer Edge versions when switching tabs.

My workaround has been to add an action to click something on the tab/page without activating - that effectively seems to activate the page. Initially trying to click the refresh icon on the page, seems to be working and the following actions then work quickly.

Also on v6.10.5

Regards

Kirk

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:16:40 GMT

Hi @expertcr ,

Thanks for the tip! However, our robots have been working smoothly for years now and just from one day to another, they all became super slow. Attaching, spying, clicking all still works fine, but every action takes minutes. While the average handling time was 1-2 minutes per case yesterday, it became 15 minutes per case today without any changes on anything.

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Michael_S — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:17:25 GMT

@Kirk.Russell @Mohamad_Dakkouri @expertcr - I just wanted to drop in and say thank you for your helpful contributions to this discussion so far. Lots of good advice here, and I hope it's helping you get to the bottom of this @osmandvci !

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Thu, 23 May 2024 08:22:45 GMT

Hey @Kirk.Russell ,

Thanks for your advise! I think your issue was a bit different.

Our robots have been working perfectly fine for many years now and they also just use 1 tab and 1 open browser. There is no switching between tabs or opening extra instances.

All robots using MS Edge (around 8 different robots) are suddenly impacted. Monday everything was still fine as usual with average handling times between 1 and 2 minutes per case. On Tuesday they all have 15-18 minutes handling time per case. There was no update on Edge or the VM's. There is still plenty of space in the database and the extension is also fine since the robots can still work and click but just extremely slow.

Kind regards,

Osman

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Kirk.Russell — Thu, 23 May 2024 09:28:14 GMT

Hi Osman

Was worth a mention! But yes sounds like the scenarios are different. I think other developers I am in contact with are finding something similar to you as well and trying to identify with BP what the issue is. Some are making recordings of Task Manager showing the virtual workers' CPUs being maxed out for long periods of time for no apparent reason - are you seeing something similar? All seem to be quite recent too - not sure of which BP version they are on.

Regards

Kirk

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Thu, 30 May 2024 11:45:48 GMT

Hi all,
We managed to pinpoint the issue a bit more. The issue lies with UIA mode. All elements spied with UIA mode takes a lot of time. Elements spied with browser mode or AA do not have any issues.

Now we are trying to figure out what the issue with UIA is. Nothing changed on the VM's, Edge, Blue Prism or the extension.
Blue Prism support is helping us, but so far no solution found.
Kind regards,
Osman

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Andreas__Molin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:15:03 GMT

We have the same issue. It works fine for a while, then all of the sudden during a session the time it takes to interact with any UIA spied element, is like 10+ times slower. This continues until Automate.exe is rebooted (we usually just reboot the whole VM that has gotten this behavior). Then every thing stays normal for several hours before getting slow again.
Once the slowness has started, it is affecting all UIA spied elements in any application. Not only MS Edge that is.
Stopping and starting a process does not help. So this "sickness" is showing in all process sessions (where elements are UIA spied) once it has started.

@osmandvci Is you find a solution, please please write it in this tread! 🙂

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 13:29:11 GMT

Hey Andreas,

Thanks for your reply!

We are currently respying those elements with browser mode/AA mode and sending "Enters" to click on it. We still did not manage to find the cause / solution. We upgraded to BP V7.3 to try it, but that also did not fix the issue and since it requires a lot of config, we rolled back to BP 6.10.5.

If we ever find the solution, I'll post it here 🙂
Kr,

Osman

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Andreas__Molin — Wed, 05 Jun 2024 14:42:35 GMT

We are running BP version 7.2.1 and we were thinking about going for 7.3 to see if that could solve the problem. So thank you for pointing out this is not the solution to this problem!
Respying all the UIA elements is going to be so much fun! (No not really)

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

asilarow — Thu, 06 Jun 2024 07:21:36 GMT

Are you on Edge v125?

If so, then this might be it:

https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/discussions/microsoft-ui-automation-and-edge-v125/m-p/4157152

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Andreas__Molin — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 06:38:26 GMT

Thanks for your input!
What you link to might be related to the problem but it does not add up entirely.

Things work just fine in the same speed as always when you have rebooted the virtual machine (or simply reboot Automate.exe on it) that has gotten the "infection" (like I have started to call it :-)). Then after several hours it gets very slow handling the cases. But only on the steps/actions where the element is spied using UIA. Everything else runs like it should.

Also, I have found this is not only happening in MS Edge. The slowness is also present in other, non browser related objects where there is one or many UIA elements.

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

osmandvci — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 07:02:14 GMT

Hey!

We tried on V122 and also V125. Unfortunately, both have the same problem.

@Andreas__Molin , a reboot doesn't help for us 😞

We now have mostly finished reworking UIA elements to browser/AA elements.

Hope we still can find the real cause and solution.

Kind regards,

Osman

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Denis__Dennehy — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 10:17:47 GMT

UIA mode, or AA mode before it, effectively trawls through a massive element tree of an application with all its attributes checking each one against the attributes you selected when originally identifying them in Application Modeller.

If something has changed in Edge for your application that has shifted the position of your elements in the UIA or AA trees it might be worth respying them - using the best practice guides for those interfaces (experiment with match index and match reverse, make sure you use an ID attributes that short circuit the search through the model, etc...)

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Andreas__Molin — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 11:50:45 GMT

I agree. Finding the root cause is key here.

Changing from UIA to AA (or other spying modes) in all our objects is gonna take forever.

Re: MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

Andreas__Molin — Fri, 07 Jun 2024 12:01:17 GMT

Thanks Denis! But since it first is totally normal for many hours before it starts getting very slow as soon as an UIA spied element is encounters, I can't see that it can be related to change in the Edge related application. Also, this effects all UIA spied element in all our objects when it kicks in on a VM. Not only browser based application that is.

Basically, when a VM has gotten this "infection" all the processes running on that VM will be extremely slow if they use UIA spied elements in their underlying objecs. Until Automate.exe is killed and restarted, then everything is fine again for hours.

If I look at memory usage for the BP (Automate.exe in Task manager) it is around 300 MB which to me looks perfectly normal. Otherwise that would explain this problem quite good I think.