I suggest for failing tests that we create heisenbug issues and investigate them. Turning off tests shouldn't be an option.
I'm not sure it's entirely CRUD operations that are the issue. For example in this build https://travis-ci.org/apache/incubator-openwhisk/builds/308624838 (PR 3017), the failing test does NO CRUD operations. It writes directly to CouchDb and then queries the db for the records. So here I suspect clustered couchdb. We have nearly doubled the number of containers we're deploying in Travis: 2 couchdb instances, 2 kafka instances, 2 controllers, 2 invokers, and 2x+ stem cell containers at start up. This could be putting resource pressure on the VM that slows things down. -r
