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CI waits up to 20 minutes on Ubuntu's mirror for packages Chromium and Firefox do not use #73
Description
The Firefox browser suite took 12 to 24 minutes on 2026-10-23 where it takes 3 to 4. The time is in playwright install --with-deps firefox, and in that step it is apt fetching 51.6 MB of Ubuntu packages from azure.archive.ubuntu.com:
| Run | apt fetch | Rate |
|---|---|---|
main, 08:29 |
19 min 53 s | 43 kB/s |
| #70, 01:49 | 13 min 3 s | 66 kB/s |
| #68, 01:04 | 8 min 27 s | 102 kB/s |
| #70, 06:39 | 2 s | 26 MB/s |
Firefox itself, 111 MiB from Playwright's CDN, took about a second each time. At the same moments, WebKit's job fetched 117 MB from the same mirror in 6 to 8 s, so this depends on the runner a job gets, not on the mirror or on Firefox. The test job's --with-deps chromium (25.9 MB) is exposed the same way.
None of what apt adds for these two browsers is used:
- Firefox: fonts (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Unicode), Xvfb, and FFmpeg's
libavcodec60with about 30 codec libraries. - Chromium: the same fonts and Xvfb,
libnss3-tools, and upgrades of glib and NSS.
The suites run headless, so Xvfb is never started. No test waits on decoded media; they check bytes, ranges and states. The runner image ships Chrome and Firefox, so the libraries these browsers link against are there already, which is why apt only adds these extras.
WebKit needs its packages (GStreamer and the rest) and is out of scope here.
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