Headless Chromium - performance

Question

I've been struggling with Headless Chromium performance. My plan is to capture loaded web site with at least 30fps (or even higher). However, with increasing resolution, the frequency of returned frames drops down.

For a window resolution 720p, I can easily reach to the ~35fps whenever change a resolution to 1080p then the number of frames goes down to ~20fps or even lower. I run the chromium on Google Cloud Compute Engine on a machine with 30 CPUs, which is not fully used at all.

Any of you faced a similar issue?

Some of my settings:

• To capture frames the app uses Chrome devtools event "Page.screencastFrame".
• Google Cloud Compute Engine - 30CPU, 30GB memory
• Flags: -disable-translate --disable-extensions --disable-background-networking --safebrowsing-disable-auto-update --disable-sync --metrics-recording-only --disable-default-apps --no-first-run --remote-debugging-port=9222 --user-data-dir=/var/app/CHROME --disable-setuid-sandbox --window-size=1920,1080 --disable-gpu --hide-scrollbars --user-agent=true --remote-debugging-address=0.0.0.0 --no-sandbox --no-zygote --headless --autoplay-policy=no-user-gesture-required --disable-notifications --disable-logging --disable-permissions-api

Answer 1

I found that if I ran my containers in a silent period, they ran faster, moving away from the Gitlab-CI rig to a machine with much faster disks improved it.

Size of the container matters (alpine), also have very fast SSDs on your container host. Running alpine v3.10 container with chromium v77 on a new rig, I was able to reduce the timing from 117sec to 43sec, but Alpine is not so flexible and if You have to compile stuff, it becomes almost as big as an ubuntu container.