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?
Are you using waitUntil? You need to adjust what it’s waiting for. Networkidle2 works great for simple pages, but if there’s a lot of BS that never stops firing then it may never conder it loaded. I use domcontentloaded plus a hard coded delay.
Write a quick queryselector and have it click accept if it’s there.
Not much you can do about that. Chrome just sucks. Any alternative is either going to use just as much ram, or not be representative of the real world. So you’re stuck with Chrome wearing different hats. Not using shitty hardware for it is amazing. We have some hosts that are almost 15 year old hardware and they’re painfully slow. But put on something modern with an ssd and it’s pretty fast. You just have to keep memory under control to keep it relatively cheap. You could probably buy an old laptop and run it as a server for about a years worth of decent VPS costs. As long as it’s got an ssd it’ll be fast enough for this.