929473 - Disable screensaver on Win8 machines to stop test run timeouts

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Infrastructure & Operations :: RelOps: General, task)

Description

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Broken out from bug 920952:

(In reply to Joel Maher (:jmaher) from comment #77)
> I suspect the root cause of this bug is the screen saver mode.  We (jlund
> and myself) determined in Talos that the win8 boxes have a screen saver that
> starts with 15 minutes of inactivity.  If the browser is automated (metro
> mode only?) and the run takes >15 minutes the browser process will be
> suspended and the python script will time out.  We would run into all types
> of timeout problems and after changing the shut off screen timer from 15
> minutes to 120 minutes (just picked a single number) our tests have
> continued to run reliably.

Please can we disable the screensavers on the Win8 machines? :-)

Comment 1

[Q]

we are already disabling screen savers on windows 8 (at least according to the dcs) . Is this only kicking in metro mode ?

Comment 2

[Jim Mathies [:jimm]]

Might be the "turn off the screen" setting based on a comment by jlund in bug 897420, comment 75.

Comment 3

[Q]

Got it. The screen saver is disabled which seems to prevent screen savers in desktop mode. It seems the registry setting for the timeout and ScreenSaverIsSecure has to be explicitly set to make this work across the board in windows 8. I have modified the gpo to check and set this this at logon time for cltbld. Changes should go out now.

Comment 4

[Q]

ScreenSaveActive = 0
ScreenSaveTimeOut = 0
ScreenSaverIsSecure = 0

Comment 5

[Q]

Also double checking "always on" power option is set ( just in case)

Comment 6

[Armen [:armenzg]]

Thank you Q!
This should be fixed from your comments.

jmaher, edmorley: please let us know if this is not fixed.

Comment 7

[Ed Morley [:emorley]]

Thank you :-)