test(policy): address timeouts and flakiness #14773
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Policy tests are very flaky. Currently one of the main culprits is that service account creation sometimes isn't caught as an event by the watcher, blocking `await_service_account` until it times out after 60s. We already have in place up to 3 retries when calling `cargo nextest`, but these tests are sequential and the 60s timeouts start accumulating until we reach the CI job timeout at 20min. This change lowers the service account creation timeout down to 15s, understanding that if the watcher catches that event it will do pretty quickly or else block indefinitely. So better to fail faster and trigger the test retry ASAP.
alpeb
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adleong
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Dec 2, 2025
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I wonder if the reduction in flakiness we get here is just because checking for the service account with a synchronous call takes time, allowing for more time for the namespace to be persisted. I.e. I wonder if the service account get is roughly equivalent to a sleep here.
I also wonder if awaiting for the namespace to show up in a watch could get rid of the flakiness entirely by guaranteeing that kubernetes is ready for us to initiate the namespaced service account watch.
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Policy tests are very flaky. Currently one of the main culprits is that service account creation sometimes isn't caught as an event by the watcher, blocking
await_service_accountuntil it times out after 60s. We already have in place up to 3 retries when callingcargo nextest, but these tests are sequential and the 60s timeouts start accumulating until we reach the CI job timeout at 20min.This change first lowers the service account creation timeout down to 15s, understanding that if the watcher catches that event it will do pretty quickly or else block indefinitely. So better to fail faster and trigger the test retry ASAP.
With this change,
test-policy (v1.34, linkerd, experimental)is finally passing, taking 17m due to the large number of retries:After having measured this, we also added a check in
await_service_accountto bypass the watcher logic if the SA is already in place. This resulted in the same tests taking only 12m with far less flakiness: