Improve startup time of Cypress and reduce time to dl/unzip

[jennifer-shehane]

What would you like?

• Instant startup time of cypress open and cypress run.
• Reduce unzip time during downloading Cypress

Why is this needed?

This will improve the test timing of all users as well as our internal development time since we use Cypress to test Cypress itself.

Other

• Bundle all the modules in the app into an Electron snapshot which means they're already loaded in memory.
• Intermediate stage for transpiling the TS files - much faster than it's done now. When we build the binary - we transpile to JS - so we want to do on the fly transpilation to do that.
• May be released for Mac/Linux first, Windows to follow.

Tech brief here: https://github.com/cypress-io/tech-briefs/tree/main/briefs/startup-performance

Timeline of Work

First Release with Estimates

• Tests Run in Electron when Using V8 Snapshot Will Sometimes Crash #22985 - 1/2 week
• Move electron-mksnapshot to the Monorepo #23263 - 1 day
• Create a Mechanism To Unofficially Benchmark Startup Time Easily #22990 - 1/2 week
• Move Packherd to the Monorepo #22979 - 1/2 week
• Move v8-snapshot to the Monorepo #22980 - 1/2 week
• Add Snapshot Package to Monorepo #22982 - 1/2 week
• Adding a New Require in Cypress Code Can Cause Generating Prod Snapshots to Fail #22989 - 1 week
• Ensure that Stack Traces Are Aligned when Using Snapshots #22983 - 2 weeks
• Setup the Binary Build Process to Copy the V8 Snapshot #22984 - 1 week
• window is Being Rewritten By V8 Snapshot in routes-e2e for getLocalStorage #22986 - 1/2 week
• Incorporate Snapshot Generation into the Build Process #22995 - 1 week
• [Feature Request]: Allow custom v8 snapshots to be used in the main process and the default snapshot in the browser process electron/electron#35170 - 1 week
• Fix Various Additional Failures due to V8 Snapshots #22992 - 2 weeks
• Ensure that the Data in packages/server/config/app.yml is Embedded in the V8 Snapshot #22994 - 1 week
• Support Windows with V8 Snapshots #23122 - 2 weeks
• Optimize the Binary with V8 Snapshots by Removing Unneeded Dependencies #23123 - 2 weeks

[cypress-bot]

The code for this is done in cypress-io/cypress#24295, but has yet to be released.
We'll update this issue and reference the changelog when it's released.

[cypress-bot]

Released in 11.0.0.

This comment thread has been locked. If you are still experiencing this issue after upgrading to
Cypress v11.0.0, please open a new issue.