[Bug]: Traces not cleaned up after successful tests when using retain-on-failure, causing disk space issues

[TiagoMAGarcia]

Version

1.56.1

Steps to reproduce

Activate the "retain-on-failure" trace option

Expected behavior

Traces for successful tests should be cleaned up immediately after each test completes successfully, rather than waiting until the end of the entire run. This would prevent disk space accumulation during long test runs.

Actual behavior

When using trace: 'retain-on-failure', traces for successful tests appear to only be cleaned up after the entire pipeline run completes. In our pipeline, this causes the dedicated drive to fill up during execution, leading to pipeline failures before all tests can complete.

Additional context

No response

Environment

System:
    OS: Windows 11 10.0.22631
    CPU: (16) x64 AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D 8-Core Processor           
    Memory: 1.59 GB / 31.10 GB
  Binaries:
    Node: 22.19.0 - C:\nvm4w\nodejs\node.EXE
    npm: 11.5.2 - C:\nvm4w\nodejs\npm.CMD
  IDEs:
    VSCode: 1.99.0 - D:\Microsoft VS Code\bin\code.CMD
  npmPackages:
    @playwright/test: 1.56.1 => 1.56.1 
    playwright: 1.56.1 => 1.56.1

[pavelfeldman]

Investigation note: this is about the page traces collecting in the artifacts folder.

Looks like everything is collected. Please follow the issue template to provide a repro.