Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

chromestatus.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 161 posts

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#92

Post by jotto »

nreece wrote: post #68

I've been testing Chrome headless extensively for the past few months, and while it's a good step, but it's not stable for high-volume or even diverse set of webpages. Memory usage is pretty high, lot of heavy webpages result in crashes/hangs, there are many inconsistencies between features available in full version and headless, their debugging protocol has different APIs that work on headless/non-headless in Linux…

I've been successfully using Chrome headless in a 500MB Docker container for dumping the DOM for https://www.prerender.cloud/ for months (rendering a large variety of sites without restarts for weeks at a time)

Run it with:

  --js-flags="--max_old_space_size=500"
to force the VM to keep it GC'd below 500

Chrome v55 was a 30% memory savings, before that I used 1GB containers.

It's not perfect, but I am definitely pushing high volume (multiple tabs, concurrent activity) and I am not having any significant stability issues and I am pushing diverse sets of webpages.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#95

Post by LoSboccacc »

bluepnume wrote: post #10

This is fantastic. I'm using a combination of Chrome and PhantomJS for karma testing right now, for https://github.com/paypal/paypal-checkout and https://github.com/krakenjs/xcomponent . There are hundreds of tests opening up hundreds of iframes and popup windows, and sending a lot of cross-window messages, and that ends up being really memory hungry. Chrome deals pretty well with garbage collection, so long as I'm c…

We're using xvfb and selenium* for testing and a proper headless support would be a hundred time more stable than the self restarting framebuffer can't wait to move to headless chrome

*Yeah I know phantomjs is more cool these days but phantom doesn't support windows height so there's that.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#96

Post by RandomBookmarks »

ctphipps wrote: post #6

Any way of scripting this to automate button clicks etc? I use PhantomJS for this now but found it to be incredibly unstable for complex pages.

For complex pages, there is Kantu, which is based on Chromium: https://www.a9t9.com/kantu/web-automation

Not headless, but ideally suited for automating complex websites (date controls, etc).

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#98

Post by vvoyer »

jotto wrote: post #92
nreece wrote: post #68

I've been testing Chrome headless extensively for the past few months, and while it's a good step, but it's not stable for high-volume or even diverse set of webpages. Memory usage is pretty high, lot of heavy webpages result in crashes/hangs, there are many inconsistencies between features available in full version and headless, their debugging protocol has different APIs that work on headless/non-headless in Linux…

I've been successfully using Chrome headless in a 500MB Docker container for dumping the DOM for https://www.prerender.cloud/ for months (rendering a large variety of sites without restarts for weeks at a time) Run it with: --js-flags="--max_old_space_size=500" to force the VM to keep it GC'd below 500 Chrome v55 was a 30% memory savings, before that I used 1GB containers. It's not perfect, but I am definitely pushin…

What the best strategy that worked for you on high volumes, multiple tabs or multiple docker instances? I am wondering if multiple tabs is as efficient as multiple windows/instances.

Thanks.

Re: Chrome 59 has cross-platform headless support

#99

Post by onion2k »

ericb wrote: post #60

Would this run as a chrome driver for Selenium? What is needed to make this work with Selenium?

It should be possible, but as a browser rather than a driver so you'd still need Chromedriver to glue Chrome and Selenium together. In Karma with karma-chrome-launcher[1] you can pass options to the browser using the flags option, eg;

customLaunchers: { chrome_headless: { base: 'Chrome', flags: ['--headless'] } }

I've not tested that yet but I can't really see a reason why it wouldn't work.

[1] https://github.com/karma-runner/karma-chrome-launcher

Post reply on HN