Working on a project where I need to grab screenshots of pages on a schedule — mostly for QA and keeping a visual history of what changed and when.
Right now I’m running Puppeteer in a cron job on a cheap VPS. It works, but honestly it’s a pain to maintain. Chromium eats RAM like crazy, sometimes it hangs and the whole thing needs a restart, and the screenshots come out wrong on pages that load content dynamically.
A few things I’ve been struggling with:
- Pages with lazy-loaded images — half the time the screenshot fires before everything renders
- Cookie consent banners blocking the actual content
- Memory usage goes through the roof when I try to do more than ~50 pages in a batch
I’ve looked into Playwright as a replacement but from what I can tell the resource usage is about the same. Also tried running headless Chrome in Docker which at least makes cleanup easier, but didn’t solve the core problems.
Curious what others are using. Are screenshot APIs worth it for this kind of thing, or is self-hosting still the way to go? Anyone running something similar at scale?
Puppeteer is the tool. It takes some getting used to.
You can set a bunch of triggers that determine exactly when the screenshot fires, and you can simulate mouse movement and scrolling to deal with lazy loading.
There’s even time delays that differentiates between human time and machine time, allowing you to have the software act as if it was running for longer than it actually was, which deals with other weirdness seen in web apps.
You can run it inside Docker which might simplify things for you.
I ended up writing a node.js app to control puppeteer precisely how I needed to.
Source: I spent 48 months or so using it for a project that required all of that.