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When I've talked to people running this kind of ai scraping/agent workflow, the costs of the AI parts dwarf that of the web browser parts. This causes computati
by JoelEinbinder 2y ago
When I've talked to people running this kind of ai scraping/agent workflow, the costs of the AI parts dwarf that of the web browser parts. This causes computational cost of the browser to become irrelevant. I'm curious what situation you got yourself in where optimizing the browser results in meaningful savings. I'd also like to be in that place!
I think your ram usage benchmark is deceptive. I'd expect a minimal browser to have much lower peak memory usage than chrome on a minimal website. But it should even out or get worse as the websites get richer. The nature of web scraping is that the worst sites take up the vast majority of your cpu cycles. I don't think lowering the ram usage of the browser process will have much real world impact.
- refulgentis 2y agoGenerally, for consumer use cases, it's best to A) do it locally, preserving some of the original web contract B) run JS to get actual content C) post-process to reduce inference cost D) get latency as low as possible Then, as the article points out, the Big Guns making the LLMs are a big use case for this because they get a 10x speedup and can begin contemplating running JS. It sounds like the people you've talked to are in a messy middle: no incentive to improve efficiency of loading pages, simply because there's something else in the system that has a fixed cost to it. I'm not sure why that would rule out improving anything else, it doesn't seem they should be stuck doing nothing other than flailing around for cheaper LLM inference. > I think your ram usage benchmark is deceptive. I'd expect a minimal browser to have much lower peak memory usage than chrome on a minimal website. I'm a bit lost, the ram usage benchmark says its ~10x less, and you feel its deceptive because you'd expect ram usage to be less? Steelmanning: 10% of Chrome's usage is still too high?
- JoelEinbinder 2y agoThe benchmark shows lower ram usage on a very simple demo website. I expect that if the benchmark ran on a random set of real websites, ram usage would not be meaningfully lower than Chrome. Happy to be impressed and wrong if it remains lower.
- fbouvier 2y agoI believe it will be still significantly lower as we skip the graphical rendering. But to validate that we need to increase our Web APIs coverage.
- fbouvier 2y agoThe cost of the browser part is still a problem. In our previous startup, we were scraping >20 millions of webpages per day, with thousands of instances of Chrome headless in parallel. Regarding the RAM usage, it's still ~10x better than Chrome :) It seems to be coming mostly from v8, I guess that we could do better with a lightweight JS engine alternative.
- Tostino 2y agoYou may reduce ram, but also performance. A good JIT costs ram.
- fbouvier 2y agoYes, that's true. It's a balance to find between RAM and speed. I was thinking more on use cases that require to disable JIT anyway (WASM, iOS integration, security).
- Tostino 2y agoYeah, could be nice to allow the user to select the type of ECMAScript engine that fits their use-case / performance requirements (balancing the resources available).
- cxr 2y agoIf your target is consistent enough (perhaps even stationary), then at some point "JIT" means wasting CPU cycles.
- cush 2y ago> there are hundreds of Web APIs, and for now we just support some of them (DOM, XHR, Fetch) > it's still ~10x better than Chrome Do you expect it to stay that way once you've reached parity?
- fbouvier 2y agoI don't expect it to change a lot. All the main components are there, it's mainly a question of coverage now.
- szundi 2y agoThen came deepseek