Selenium Python webscraper really slow

Question

I'm a newbie getting into web scrapers. I've made something that works, but it takes hours and hours to get everything I need. I read something about using parallel processes to process the URLs but I have no clue how to go about it and incorporate it in what I already have. Help is much appreciated!

Here is my, still extremely messy, code. I'm still learning :)

from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver.common.by import By
from selenium.webdriver.support.ui import WebDriverWait
from selenium.webdriver.support import expected_conditions as EC 
from selenium.common.exceptions import TimeoutException
from bs4 import BeautifulSoup
from selenium.common.exceptions import NoSuchElementException
import time
import random
import pprint
import itertools
import csv
import pandas as pd

start_url = "https://www.nationalevacaturebank.nl/vacature/zoeken?query=&location=&distance=city&limit=100&sort=relevance&filters%5BcareerLevel%5D%5B%5D=Starter&filters%5BeducationLevel%5D%5B%5D=MBO"

driver = webdriver.Firefox()
driver.set_page_load_timeout(20)
driver.get(start_url)
driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="form_save"]').click() #accepts cookies

wait = WebDriverWait(driver, random.randint(1500,3200)/1000.0)
j = random.randint(1500,3200)/1000.0
time.sleep(j)
num_jobs = int(driver.find_element_by_xpath('/html/body/div[3]/div/main/div[2]/div[3]/div/header/h2/span').text)
num_pages = int(num_jobs/102)

urls = []
list_of_links = []

for i in range(num_pages+1):
        try:


            elements = wait.until(EC.presence_of_all_elements_located((By.XPATH, '//*[@id="search-results-container"]//article/job/a')))
            for i in elements:
                list_of_links.append(i.get_attribute('href'))

            j = random.randint(1500,3200)/1000.0
            time.sleep(j) 

            if 'page=3' not in driver.current_url:
                driver.find_element_by_xpath('//html/body/div[3]/div/main/div[2]/div[3]/div/paginator/div/nav[1]/ul/li[6]/a').click()
            else:
                driver.find_element_by_xpath('//html/body/div[3]/div/main/div[2]/div[3]/div/paginator/div/nav[1]/ul/li[5]/a').click()

            url = driver.current_url
            if url not in urls:
                print(url)
                urls.append(url)

            else:
                break


        except:
            continue


set_list_of_links = list(set(list_of_links))
print(len(set_list_of_links), "results")                
driver.close()

def grouper(n, iterable):
    it = iter(iterable)
    while True:
       chunk = tuple(itertools.islice(it, n))
       if not chunk:
           return
       yield chunk

def remove_empty_lists(l):
    keep_going = True
    prev_l = l
    while keep_going:
        new_l = remover(prev_l)
        #are they identical objects?
        if new_l == prev_l:
            keep_going = False
        #set prev to new
        prev_l = new_l
    #return the result
    return new_l


def remover(l):
    newlist = []
    for i in l:
        if isinstance(i, list) and len(i) != 0:
            newlist.append(remover(i))
        if not isinstance(i, list):
            newlist.append(i)

    return newlist

vacatures = []
chunks = grouper(100, set_list_of_links)
chunk_count = 0

for chunk in chunks: 
    chunk_count +=1
    print(chunk_count)
    j = random.randint(1500,3200)/1000.0
    time.sleep(j)

    for url in chunk:

        driver = webdriver.Firefox()
        driver.set_page_load_timeout(20)

        try: 
            driver.get(url)
            driver.find_element_by_xpath('//*[@id="form_save"]').click() #accepts cookies

            vacature = []
            vacature.append(url)

            j = random.randint(1500,3200)/1000.0
            time.sleep(j)

            elements = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('dl')
            p_elements = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('p')
            li_elements = driver.find_elements_by_tag_name('li')

            for i in elements:
                if "Salaris:" not in i.text:
                    vacature.append(i.text)

            running_text = list()
            for p in p_elements:
                running_text.append(p.text)

            text= [''.join(running_text)]

            remove_ls = ['vacatures', 'carrièretips', 'help', 'inloggen', 'inschrijven', 'Bezoek website', 'YouTube',
                        'Over Nationale Vacaturebank', 'Werken bij de Persgroep', 'Persberichten', 'Autotrack', 'Tweakers',
                        'Tweakers Elect', 'ITBanen', 'Contact', 'Carrière Mentors', 'Veelgestelde vragen',
                         'Vacatures, stages en bijbanen', 'Bruto Netto Calculator', 'Salariswijzer', 'Direct vacature plaatsen',
                         'Kandidaten zoeken', 'Bekijk de webshop', 'Intermediair', 'Volg ons op Facebook']

            for li in li_elements:
                if li.text not in remove_ls: 
                    text.append(li.text)

            text = ''. join(text)
            vacature.append(text)

            vacatures.append(vacature)

            driver.close() 

        except TimeoutException as ex:
            isrunning = 0
            print("Exception has been thrown. " + str(ex))
            driver.close()

        except NoSuchElementException:
            continue 

Answer 1

You can scrape by simultaneously opening multiple tabs side by side in the same scraper program. For doing so, you can refer to this code:

import time
from selenium import webdriver
from selenium.webdriver import ChromeOptions

options = ChromeOptions()
profile = rf'\\PATH'
my_profile = rf'user-data-dir={profile}'
options.add_argument(my_profile)
driver = webdriver.Chrome(options=options)

# driver.execute_script("window.open('about:blank','google');")
# driver.switch_to.window("google")
driver.get('http://google.com')

driver.execute_script("window.open('about:blank','facebook');")
driver.switch_to.window("facebook")
driver.get('https://www.facebook.com/')

driver.execute_script("window.open('about:blank','twitter');")
driver.switch_to.window("twitter")
driver.get('https://twitter.com/')

driver.execute_script("window.open('about:blank','instagram');")
driver.switch_to.window("instagram")
driver.get('https://www.instagram.com/')

time.sleep(1)
driver.switch_to.window("twitter")
time.sleep(1)
driver.switch_to.window("facebook")
time.sleep(1)
driver.switch_to.window("google")
time.sleep(1)
driver.switch_to.window("instagram")
time.sleep(1)
driver.switch_to.window("facebook")

driver.close()
driver.quit()

Answer 2

You can use Scrapy and this is much faster and more flexible than anything. See link for more information.

Answer 3

1. You're using Firefox which is slower than Chrome in almost all real-life applications.
2. Xpath is the slowest selector, match by id or class. If that is not possible then by CSS.
3. Use headless mode and don't load images unless you need to.

Answer 4

Python Selenium webdriver is not thread-safe. This means your browser can not correctly consume asynchronous calls from multiple threads. Try to scrape websites with requests and bs4 + lxml. It's much faster than Selenium. This answer can be helpful.