Slowness in BitBar Live

I have used Bitbar over the past couple of years, primarily to crossbrowser test Safari. The experience has always been terrible. Today and in various sessions over the past week, I have tried to test using Mac OS 13 - US and Safari 18. The experience is so laggy that we cannot reliably evaluate how parts of our application is behaving when comparing to other browsers and OS that I can test installed on my Windows 11 laptop.

The problem starts as soon as I try to log into our application. It takes forever for the keystrokes to catch up when typing in the username or password field. The simulator even gets hung up sometimes between upper and lower case. Once we get past that and log in, we try to see how Safari is behaving on a feature using common mouse-over highlighting on a report. We though that the feature was not working in Safari and this set off all kinds of concerns. Then a developer on our team used his native macbook with Safari and this made clear that the issue was completely in BitBar and not on a real Mac with Safari.

What's the point of BitBar if the performance is so awful that we cannot do basic crossbrowser testing evaluation?!

I've used BitBar at the office with work laptop and at home on my personal laptop, both on high speed Ethernet and it is the same lousy-laggy experience! It's been this way for the past couple of years. We need to find a better tool and move on!