81–90 of 251 posts
Just hot stage a bunch of VMs and then there is no startup time. Every time someone finishes, just start another one and leave it running waiting for the next customer.
Just use something like https://shellbox.dev instead of FireCracker inside ec2. Much simpler, boxes are up in a couple of seconds, and it is way cheaper.
I'm a bit surprised that with all this, they still stuck with Chromium. We have a much less sophisticated setup in our web-access MCP server[0] where browser instances are spawned as subprocesses and the biggest win in stability, CPU and memory usage we had was in switching from Chrome to Lightpanda[1]. Fitting to the statement at the end of the article, the faster browser to boot might be one that allocates less mem…
Browsers like LightPanda lack stealth at all, they are trivial to detect. There are ways to make Chromium more performant, by removing everything that you don't need.
We believe that Chromium can reach that performance without starting an entire engine from scratch, and without losing stealth, a top priority for us.
The language is not the problem, C++ is as performant as Zig, but Chromium bloat is huge, agree on that.
No mention of the tools/methods used to do the profiling, I think that would be the most interesting part. Also a bit surprising that a checkpoint with the browser running wouldn't just work. Is this some quirk of firecracker?
Main blockers right now is fingerprint injection and profile injection, solved already.
It's always a balance of engineering effort & gains. Post-Chromium snapshot let's us save 200ms, which is not that important for 99% of use-cases, but that will come soon since it brings some other benefits (like CPU footprint)
Profiling and tools used are already included with Chromium, they provide nice debugging tools
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Seems very unethical, no? Who uses service providers like this? The whole point of anti-bot measures is to get rid of bots - you are not wanted there. Unethical just because it does something someone else doesn't want? I guess it depends on why and what the intention is. I don't have time to sit 24/7 in front of a computer to get a ticket to some events, does that mean it's unethical for me to use my own bot so I c…
Its unethical because you're intentionally bypassing restrictions. Just because others do it doesn't mean its okay. If you saw a sign in a store that said "1 per person" or "for registered guests only", would you ignore it?
There are many valid ethical exceptions for evading anti-bot detections. For example: you are a white hat actor scraping a black hat site. There are hundreds of other plausible examples.
We run a screenshot API (ApiFlash) with Chromium packaged in an AWS Lambda container image instead of Firecracker on EC2. AWS Lambda gives you the isolation and autoscaling for free which is ideal for spiky stateless work like screenshots. I believe we get mostly the same benefits compared to browser-use solution but with a much much simpler architecture. The tradeoff is the AWS lambda cold starts, but in practice se…
Few issues we had with lambas: - Limited running time (15 min), we support up to 4 hours (we can run longer if needed) - Price - Lack of snapshotting mechanisms - Lack of low-level control over the running host
But yeah, lambda is way more than enough for most common use cases automating the web
1. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/whats-new/2026/02/amazon-ec...
crazy that the maker of chrome(google) and also the owner of a massive amount of cloud services has not made a cloud product identical to this yet
They have IMO: https://web.archive.org/web/20180823072111/https://cloud.goo... They just don't have access to giant pools of residential IPs, so too many sites end up blocking all the cloud providers by IP range/ASN anyway, even if they could get through a captcha.