arrow-left Back to topicQuizShardingCheck yourself1.You set up 4 shards in CI. Three shards finish in 3 minutes, one takes 12 minutes. The total CI time is 12 minutes instead of the expected ~3. What's most likely causing the imbalance?One machine has slower hardware than the othersfullyParallel is not enabled — Playwright splits by file, so one large file lands on one shard and dominates its runtimeThe blob reporter is causing overhead on that shard2.After all 4 shards finish, you want to see a single HTML report with all results combined. What do you need to configure and run?Use reporter: 'html' on all shards — HTML reports automatically merge when uploaded to the same artifactUse reporter: 'blob' on CI, upload each shard's blob-report as an artifact, then run npx playwright merge-reports in a separate job after all shards completeRun npx playwright test --merge on the last shard — it automatically collects results from previous shards3.What is the correct syntax to run the second shard out of four total shards?npx playwright test --shard=2-4npx playwright test --shard=2 --total=4npx playwright test --shard=2/4npx playwright test --shard-index=2 --shard-count=44.How does Playwright distribute tests across shards by default (without fullyParallel)?By test count — it counts all tests and divides them evenlyBy file — whole test files are assigned to shards, so a file with 50 tests counts the same as a file with 2 testsBy test duration from the previous runAlphabetically by test name5.In a GitHub Actions matrix strategy for sharding, what does fail-fast: false do and why is it important?It makes failing tests retry automatically without stoppingIt allows all shard jobs to complete even if one shard fails, so you collect blob reports from all shards for a complete pictureIt disables the timeout on slow shardsIt makes the matrix ignore errors and always report success6.A test retries once and passes on the retry. Which shard runs the retry — the same shard that had the original failure, or potentially a different one?A different shard is selected based on the retry numberThe same shard — retries happen within the same CI job that originally ran the testA new CI machine is spawned specifically for the retryRetries are disabled when sharding is enabled7.You have 400 tests and use 4 shards, each with workers: 2. How many tests can run simultaneously at peak?4 — one per shard2 — the worker count only8 — 4 shards × 2 workers each400 — all tests run at once8.After all shards finish and upload their blob reports, what command merges them into a single HTML report?npx playwright merge-reports --reporter html ./all-blob-reportsnpx playwright show-report --merge ./all-blob-reportsnpx playwright test --merge-from ./all-blob-reportsnpx playwright report --combine ./all-blob-reports --output htmlSubmit answersarrow-left PreviousTypeScriptSetting up CINext arrow-right