Running Chromium and FFmpeg in CI is a big source of runtime and potential flakiness. This epic aims to minimize the CPU/memory footprint and artifact cost of our browser and recording stack without sacrificing debuggability. The outcome: faster builds, lower ci costs, fewer moving parts, and a setup that is predictable and portable across Jenkins agents and other upcoming CI setup.
This epic is tool agnostic where reasonable: while our primary target is WebdriverIO on Chromium with FFmpeg, the patterns should translate to other setups too with modest tuning for FFmpeg and other tools that use Chromium.
**Goals:**
* Reduce CI time attributable to browser startup, test runtime, and artifact handling.
* Make video capture smarter (conditional recording, lower bitrate/size by default).
* If possible: Instrument and expose metrics (browser launch time, test CPU-seconds) into our existing metrics stack.
* Document the setup
* It is not a goal to rewrite the current stack, the goal is to tune what we have
**Acceptance Criteria**
// TBD