Problem/Motivation
In #3390178: big_pipe sometimes fails to load blocks we added a test to big pipe that generates a page with 3000 placeholders. This was the only way we could find to reproduce a race condition seen in the wild.
When we switched to w3c testing 3,000 placeholders caused a timeout (and still does), so we reduced the number to 2000.
2000 is still enough to make the test run very slow - as far as I can tell it is due to chrome choking on the placeholder rendering/replacement when it's CPU constrained although that is mostly conjecture. See #3590076: Speed up BigPipeRegressionTest for some experimentation.
In that issue, we skipped the test because it's more or less impossible for it to fail if we re-introduced the original bug. This issue is for trying to replace/improve it with something that consistently reproduce the bug. Potentially we could also give up and remove the coverage too.
Comments