Flaky browsertests failures on Linux with "websocket url timeout reached" and "could not unmarshal event" errors

[aalexand]

Here is an example failure, the error messages are like

++ go test ./...
--- FAIL: TestTopTable (20.06s)
    browser_test.go:77: websocket url timeout reached
2025/01/24 02:30:57 ERROR: could not unmarshal event: parse error: expected string near offset 384 of 'cookiePart...'
2025/01/24 02:30:57 ERROR: could not unmarshal event: parse error: expected string near offset 287 of 'cookiePart...'
2025/01/24 02:30:57 ERROR: could not unmarshal event: parse error: expected string near offset 384 of 'cookiePart...'
2025/01/24 02:30:58 ERROR: could not unmarshal event: parse error: expected string near offset 287 of 'cookiePart...'
FAIL

I filed a chromedp question at https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp/issues/1536, no answers so far.

One note is that we don't currently use the latest version of chromedp: https://github.com/google/pprof/blob/main/browsertests/go.mod is at 0.9.2 and https://github.com/chromedp/chromedp/tags lists 0.12.1 as the most recent version. We can't upgrade easily right now though because chromedp appears to require Go 1.23 and pprof supports two latest Go versions so it's 1.23 and 1.22 right now.