Browser automation may break near 20 concurrent sessions
A Reddit user said their Node Playwright scrapers worked in production until around 18 concurrent sessions. They reported timeouts, memory spikes, websocket drops, a stopped queue, and OOM kills. They said adding 32GB of memory did not feel like a real fix, and that staging had OOM kills since Chrome 121.
Key points
- The user was running Playwright scrapers on Node in production.
- Problems appeared around 18 concurrent browser sessions.
- They mentioned timeouts, memory spikes, websocket drops, and a stopped queue.
- Adding 32GB of memory did not seem like a real fix to them.
- They said Chrome 121 was linked to OOM kills in staging.
Quick term guide
- Playwright
- A tool that lets software open websites and click through pages automatically.
- production
- The live version of a service that real users use.
- browser session
- The logged-in state your browser keeps after you sign into a website
- infrastructure
- The technical systems that keep a website or app running.
- reliability
- How consistently a tool works without failing or behaving unexpectedly.
- liability
- Legal responsibility for causing an accident or damage.
- browser-based
- It runs in a web browser without needing a separate app install.
- concurrency
- How many requests are being handled at the same time.