Opentelemetry-js: Flaky test case 'Node SDK > Basic Registration > should register a tracer provider if a span processor is provided'

[legendecas]

What version of Node are you using?

Node v12.

What did you see instead?

Circle CI: https://app.circleci.com/pipelines/github/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/4901/workflows/287a9bd4-99fc-43c5-b1ce-1d340c8f7798/jobs/26727

  1) Node SDK
       Basic Registration
         should register a tracer provider if a span processor is provided:
     Error: Timeout of 2000ms exceeded. For async tests and hooks, ensure "done()" is called; if returning a Promise, ensure it resolves. (/root/project/packages/opentelemetry-sdk-node/test/sdk.test.ts)

Affected PR

• https://github.com/open-telemetry/opentelemetry-js/pull/1366

[dyladan]

This test is flaky because the plugin loading is taking too long. Even on my local machine, the test frequently takes longer than 1000ms. In a CI environment with limited resources, the 2000ms limit is exceeded often. This is not a problem in the other tests because the node tracer provider isn't loaded for each test.

I think the plugin system needs a drastic overhaul. Managing a list of plugins to autoload is cumbersome, the fact that a single plugin cannot instrument two modules can be a pain (as is the case with http/https and grpc/grpc-js, and would be similar with mysql/mysql2 if we supported mysql2), and plugin configuration is awkward.

[dyladan]

Flaky test fixed in #1398