[Question| Slight documentation clarification for "networkidle"

[jhyot]

The documentation on https://playwright.dev/docs/navigations#navigation-lifecycle says:

networkidle is fired when no new network requests are made for 500 ms

Does the event wait for all network requests to be finished, and only then fires, or only that no new requests are started within the last 500ms?

Maybe a slightly clearer wording could be used for the docs to make it unambiguous.

[pavelfeldman]

networkidle is discouraged. You can only use networkidle in the controlled setting (lab testing), it will pretty much never work against any production page. Rely upon web assertions instead of waiting for the network.

[petroslamb]

Reached here also looking why networkidle is discouraged. It looks promising for pages that i can not make any assumptions for and other strategies fail.

[SeanDuignan82]

networkidle is discouraged. You can only use networkidle in the controlled setting (lab testing), it will pretty much never work against any production page. Rely upon web assertions instead of waiting for the network.

I've encountered this issue and discovered only one workaround ...deploy it in a Docker container. I can confirm it works in a production environment at our company, so please don't remove this option in a future release. FYI - I do need to confirm if it works when the Docker network is set to 'host'. I'll update this thread when I'm in a position to test it.

If anyone is interested, the issue is caused by active network connection(s) held open by other applications... for me it was GIT. GIT held open an active connection (possibly a websocket ) for the duration of my git hooks execution.

[samyismaiel]

Why is networkidle discouraged? It definitely solved flakiness. Can I rely on this option to be supported?