We timed HTTP-only scraping against a headless browser on the same page. It wasn't close.
Every one of our Actors is HTTP-only — no Puppeteer, no Playwright, no headless Chromium in production. We say this is faster and cheaper. This post is the measurement, not the assertion. The setup Same target, two approaches, same box (1 vCPU / 2 GB RAM, the machine this whole business runs on): HTTP-only : GET https://allbirds.com/products.json?limit=50 — Shopify's public, unauthenticated…
We conducted a performance comparison between HTTP-only scraping and headless browser scraping on the same webpage. The results showed a significant performance gap between the two methods. For HTTP-only scraping, the time to usable data ranged from 0.14-0.23 seconds, with a peak memory usage of a few KB, while for headless Chromium, it took 7.04 seconds (after switching wait strategy) and consumed a peak memory of 146 MB.
This means that HTTP-only scraping is roughly 30-50 times faster and uses less memory than the headless browser approach. The discrepancy was largely due to the fact that HTTP-only scraping directly accessed a structured JSON API, while headless browser scraping required rendering the entire HTML page, executing JavaScript, and extracting data from the DOM.
This rendered HTML approach also required additional processing to deduplicate and structure the scraped data, whereas HTTP-only scraping provided ready-to-use structured data. The study also highlighted that waiting strategies in headless browsers could lead to unexpected delays, as modern e-commerce websites often have background XHR requests that prevent network activity from stopping.
Switching to a different wait strategy improved the performance of headless browser scraping, but it was still significantly slower than HTTP-only scraping. In conclusion, before resorting to a headless browser for scraping, it is crucial to check for the availability of a public JSON/API endpoint, as most modern websites provide one, whether explicitly documented or not.
This approach not only offers better performance but also requires less computational resources, making it a more efficient and cost-effective solution for most scraping needs.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
