Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 log messages using ChromeDriver and Chrome v80 through Selenium Java

Question

We recently upgraded our test environment with ChromeDriver v80.0.3987.16 and Chrome v80.0.3987.87 (Official Build) (64-bit) and after the upgradation even the minimal program is producing a lot of these SEVERE logs:

[1581082019.282][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.245][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 

Earlier these messages were observed occasionally till with ChromeDriver v79.0 / Chrome v79.0 combo.

Minimal Code Block:

public class chromeDemo  {     public static void main(String[] args)      {             System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\chromedriver.exe");             WebDriver driver =  new ChromeDriver();             driver.get("https://www.google.com/");             driver.quit();     } } 

Console Output:

Starting ChromeDriver 80.0.3987.16 (320f6526c1632ad4f205ebce69b99a062ed78647-refs/branch-heads/3987@{#185}) on port 9194 Only local connections are allowed. Please protect ports used by ChromeDriver and related test frameworks to prevent access by malicious code. Feb 07, 2020 6:56:57 PM org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession INFO: Detected dialect: W3C [1581082019.282][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.245][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.430][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.531][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.632][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.734][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082020.835][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082021.364][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082021.544][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082021.647][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082021.748][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082021.850][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 [1581082021.952][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 

Anyone facing the same? Was there any change in ChromeDriver/Chrome v80 with respect to ChromeDriver/Chrome v79? Any clues?

Answer 1

Interim solution

Here are the solutions for different variants of Chrome users.

• If you are using Chrome v80, using the recently released ChromeDriver 80.0.3987.106 solves the issue.

  • Code Block:

    System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\chromedriver.exe"); WebDriver driver =  new ChromeDriver(); driver.quit(); 

  • Console Output:

    Starting ChromeDriver 80.0.3987.106 (f68069574609230cf9b635cd784cfb1bf81bb53a-refs/branch-heads/3987@{#882}) on port 20041 Only local connections are allowed. Please protect ports used by ChromeDriver and related test frameworks to prevent access by malicious code. Feb 14, 2020 9:50:57 PM org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession INFO: Detected dialect: W3C 

• If you are using Chrome v81, using the recently released ChromeDriver 81.0.4044.20 solves the issue.

• If you are using Chrome from Dev or Canary channel you need to pickup the platform specific binaries:
  • Linux (64-bit)
  • Mac OS X (64-bit)
  • Windows (32-bit)

---

Permanent Solution

However, @bugdroid submitted the actual fix through this revision / commit which is as follows:

[ChromeDriver] suppress logging of retry loop timeout: r1924789 added a retry loop while waiting for DevTools messages. This spammed users' logs with uninformative timeout reports. This CL suppresses those log messages and correctly reports the command timeout value when appropriate.

Note:

• Status: Fixed
• Labels: ToBeReleased ChromeDriver-82

---

History

This error message...

[1581082020.245][SEVERE]: Timed out receiving message from renderer: 0.100 

...does not necessarily indicate a failure.

As @Tricia mentions that, ChromeDriver Version 80 modified a wait loop to allow more retries; this loop will generate that message, but it continues to listen. However the SEVERE tag for that message is misleading.

Further, in the discussion Issue 3332: Retry timeout logged as severe, @triciac [ChromeDriver Committer] also added that, ChromeDriver team added a small timeout (100 ms) to DevToolsClientImpl::HandleEventsUntil to enable additional checking of navigation status. But, unfortunately when this timeout was expiring, it is logged as SEVERE (by ProcessNextMessage). In the case of this small timeout, it should not log as SEVERE, although timeouts from SendCommandInternal still should.

So ChromeDriver needs a way to control the logging in a better way, possibly by increasing the timeout. However, if the command finally times out, the timeout duration listed being very small, then it is needed to list the user-defined timeout instead.

---

Immediate solution

As an interim solution, you can downgrade to ChromeDriver v79.0.3945.36 as it seems the SEVERE logs doesn't shows up in the console but you will observe the WARNING:

[WARNING]: This version of ChromeDriver has not been tested with Chrome version 80 

which sounds like a ...safe workaround... and had been confirmed by a Chromium team member.

• Code Block:

  public class A_Chrome  {     public static void main(String[] args)      {         System.setProperty("webdriver.chrome.driver", "C:\\Utility\\BrowserDrivers\\chromedriver.exe");         WebDriver driver =  new ChromeDriver();         driver.get("https://www.google.com/");         driver.quit();     } } 

• Console Output:

  Starting ChromeDriver 79.0.3945.36 (3582db32b33893869b8c1339e8f4d9ed1816f143-refs/branch-heads/3945@{#614}) on port 9200 Only local connections are allowed. Please protect ports used by ChromeDriver and related test frameworks to prevent access by malicious code. [1581503845.444][WARNING]: This version of ChromeDriver has not been tested with Chrome version 80. Feb 12, 2020 4:07:26 PM org.openqa.selenium.remote.ProtocolHandshake createSession INFO: Detected dialect: W3C 

---

tl; dr

You can find a couple of relevant discussions in:

• Issue 3333: ChromeDriver may block indefinitely while waiting for pending navigation after net::ERR_CONTENT_DECODING_FAILED
• Issue 3336: WebDriver 80.0.3987.16 can't open Chrome on Linux