Browser Pool does not await _createPageForBrowser

[danielcrabtree]

Which package is this bug report for? If unsure which one to select, leave blank

@crawlee/browser-pool

Issue description

The newPage and newPageInNewBrowser functions in BrowserPool both return _createPageForBrowser() without awaiting the result. This causes the browser to hang under certain difficult to reproduce race conditions - adding await to these calls appears to resolve these race conditions.

Code sample

No response

Package version

3.12.1

Node.js version

22

Operating system

No response

Apify platform

• Tick me if you encountered this issue on the Apify platform

I have tested this on the next release

No response

Other context

No response

[theanuragg]

hey @B4nan , this issue is assigned to you!.. are you working on this if not then I would love to work on this

[B4nan]

Feel free to look into it.

[theanuragg]

my approach would be By adding await before _createPageForBrowser() in both functions

[B4nan]

I am having a hard time understanding how the added awaits in #2860 could help. Both places are async, we are not ignoring any promise in there. By adding the await we only make sure the promise is finished before we return.

@danielcrabtree can you confirm #2860 is what helped on your end? I don't mind merging that, it just feels weird that this could cause a race condition.

[danielcrabtree]

I was specifically having the issue with newPage. I'm unsure if the problem occurs with newPageInNewBrowser as I wasn't using that and since it does not appear to use limiter, maybe race conditions are not an issue in that case?

My understanding of the issue is that limiter is designed to run the inline async function with concurrency of 1 to avoid race conditions between parallel browser actions.

By not awaiting _createPageForBrowser within the limiter context, this opens up the possibility of race conditions between that operation and parallel browser launches as the _createPageForBrowser method can (and in my case sometimes was) complete after exiting from the limiter context.

Adding the await to the call to _createPageForBrowser in newPage fixed the race condition for me. I was never able to produce a minimum example that reliably triggered the issue to prove this fixed it, but it's been over a month now and I have yet to see the issue.