MS Edge robots are suddenly extremely slow

[osmandvci]

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

[Andreas__Molin]

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! 🙂

[osmandvci]

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

[Andreas__Molin]

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)

[asilarow]

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

[Andreas__Molin]

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.

[osmandvci]

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

[Denis__Dennehy]

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...)

[Andreas__Molin]

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.

[Andreas__Molin]

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.