Address performance issues with video recording in Chrome 89+/Electron 12+

[flotwig]

Current behavior

We cannot upgrade to Electron 12 because of a major slowdown when video recording is enabled. We are stuck on 12.0.0-beta.14, the last version before the issue appeared.

The issue appears to be related to the Chrome 89 upgrade that occurred in 12.0.0-beta.16. Similar slowdowns occur when video recording in Cypress with Chrome 89, regardless of Electron version.

With some changes released after Chromium 89.0.4328.0 and before/at 89.0.4336.0, capturing screencasts via CDP is now causing performance issues. It seems like our CDP client is receiving many, many more frames before, to the point where the user's CPU is saturated with transmitting/encoding video frames, especially when users run in resource-constrained machines in CI.

The issue can be reproduced by changing the Chrome version as well, independently of Electron's CDP.

Desired behavior

Slowdown is isolated and fixed so that we can continue to ship the latest Electron version.

Relevant:

• [7.0.0] Performance regression from 6.8 (over 3x slower in our test suite) #15853 - slowdown issue
• chore(deps): downgrade electron to v12.0.0-beta.14 #16113 - downgrade PR

[cypress-bot]

The code for this is done in cypress-io/cypress#17408, but has yet to be released.
We'll update this issue and reference the changelog when it's released.

[cypress-bot]

Released in 8.3.0.

This comment thread has been locked. If you are still experiencing this issue after upgrading to
Cypress v8.3.0, please open a new issue.