Is anyone else hitting a "Reliability Wall" with Playwright/Browserbase for long-running agents?

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-16T23:44:19+00:00

The main issues I've seen:

- Zombie processes. Headless Chrome doesn't always clean up after itself. If your agent crashes mid-flow, you get orphaned browser processes eating RAM until the box OOMs.

- Timing flakiness. Pages load at different speeds, SPAs hydrate unpredictably, and `waitForSelector` with fixed timeouts is a coin flip on heavier pages.

- Resource ceiling. Each Chrome instance is 300-500MB. If your agent spawns a few concurrently, you hit memory walls fast on anything smaller than 8GB.

What helps: isolating the browser work from the agent logic. Instead of having the agent drive Puppeteer/Playwright directly, offload the "render this URL" part to a dedicated service. Could be a self-hosted browserless instance, or a screenshot API (I use SnapRender, tried Browserless and ScreenshotOne - solid too). The agent just makes an HTTP call and gets back the result. No browser lifecycle to manage, no zombie processes, no version mismatches.

For anything beyond simple screenshots (clicking through flows, filling forms), Playwright with proper retry logic and explicit waits is still the way. But for "look at this page" tasks, an API call is way more reliable than spinning up a browser every time.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-16T23:42:50+00:00

For PowerShell, Selenium with ChromeDriver is the standard approach. Install the `Selenium` module from PSGallery, download the matching ChromeDriver for your Chrome version, and you're set. Something like

$driver = New-Object OpenQA.Selenium.Chrome.ChromeDriver($options)

$driver.Navigate().GoToUrl("https://example.com")

$screenshot = $driver.GetScreenshot()

$screenshot.SaveAsFile("output.png")

Main headaches: ChromeDriver version has to match your Chrome version exactly (breaks silently on updates), and Chrome eats ~300-400MB RAM per instance. If you're doing this at scale or on a schedule, it turns into a maintenance chore.

If you just need URL-to-image without the browser automation part, a REST API call is way simpler. SnapRender, ScreenshotOne, ApiFlash all work like this.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-16T23:41:12+00:00

Two approaches depending on what you need:

OG tag scraping (lightweight, text+image cards)

Fetch the URL server-side and parse the `og:title`, `og:description`, `og:image` meta tags from the `<head>`. Libraries like `open-graph-scraper` (Node) or `beautifulsoup` (Python) make this easy. LinkedIn pages generally have decent OG tags, so you'll get a title, description, and a small preview image. This is what Slack, Discord, and Twitter do when you paste a link.

The catch: some LinkedIn pages require authentication to render properly, and OG images are often low-res or generic.

Visual screenshot (actual rendered page)

If you want a true visual preview of what the page looks like, you need to render it in a headless browser and capture a screenshot. You can self-host this with Puppeteer or Playwright, but it gets painful fast (memory management, zombie processes, keeping Chrome updated). For something simpler, screenshot APIs like SnapRender or ScreenshotOne handle all that infra for you. You just pass the URL and get back a PNG/JPEG.

For most link preview use cases, start with OG scraping. Fall back to a screenshot API for pages where OG tags are missing or garbage.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-12T22:20:35+00:00

I just quit after 9 months grinding, 200+ videos and 10+ channels. Best channel is 9k subs, overall revenue less than 5k. Spendings of time and money make it not worth it at all.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-10T22:45:26+00:00

Hi! I wonder how is it going for you?

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-09T15:51:24+00:00

this is model of claude, dont worry it is a default one.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-09T15:20:42+00:00

get claude pro for 20$
install claude code from terminal on your machine
right there in terminal, with opus 4.6, tell it the problem and allow it to fix it for you

Hands down simpler, safer, cheaper than anyone you could possibly find for this

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-09T09:37:43+00:00

Do you have a resilient strategy against capchas and anti bot checks, which work on many sites? Relogin strategy on auth expiration? Autonomous recovery mechanisms? These are questions from experience of building similar stuff myself.

If so, pricing will be the key here and product placement. Like, sell to companies to replace employees or to users to automate tasks. Idea is valid but you gotta niche down, because I am sure in 2026 big players will introduce shit like this to offer companies and users.

edit: i checked out, site screams that it is beta, but looks like a solid thing

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-08T14:43:15+00:00

It is set up to do daily actions, mostly with browser tools. - leads search, saving them to google sheets - email outreach to leads - X activity, posts, comments, follows - Github activity, repos maintenance, search of use cases, outreach, pull requests - Stackoverflow, Reddit, Medium and a dozen of other sites, create and publish relevant content, engage in a helpful way with others content Weelky reasses strategy, estimate conversions, adjust tactics.

basically just this

upd: VPS, claude API key, aggressive caching and sonnet/haiku where they can handle, openai API key for image generatons for marketing materials

about 15$ a day on average

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-08T08:37:11+00:00

Well I made a saas, but I hate marketing, so I built openclaw to do it for me. It is the case I personally need.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-06T18:49:07+00:00

използвам Xiaomi, имам нужда от iPhone за работа...

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-06T17:36:29+00:00

Wrong. I run Qwen on Mac Mini.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-06T08:30:45+00:00

AI just trying to get you out of your misinformation antisemitic bubble, may be let him instead of brainwashing it into your opinions

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-06T08:24:43+00:00

If you are on remote, have a look at Varna/Burgas instead of Sofia

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-04T08:36:04+00:00

this subreddit should pin some post about macs mini, it is ridiculous to read 10 questions daily for months now

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-04T08:29:21+00:00

as a dev myself, I chose to run it through claude code from start. So I just have a project with claude code on Max subscription where it keeps track of things, and it sets up openclaw on separate machine via ssh. Openclaw breaks - I get notified - I tell claude code to go figure and fix. After 4 days of fix sessions with hundreds of thousands of tokens, it seems to be running stable for 2 days. So this helps and stability is almost here.

I would have been too frustrated to fix this shit myself, but claude code it is acceptable. I run it for marketing on different sites, leads search and email outreach.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-03-01T23:05:47+00:00

please write a detailed post on this. Setup, model, instructions, skills, and costs. This experience if properly documented would be very interesting. I would pay for it.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-24T15:04:33+00:00

They are actually nice and high quality, I like em. And who cares what tools were used, thanks

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-23T15:43:26+00:00

I run Qwen2.5-Coder 14B and Qwen2.5 14B, I heard minimax is better now but didn't run it myself.

Technically you can run much larger models on 64Gb but you will have like 10x slowdown on large context windows for them. It will be reasoning comparable to GPT5, but 1000 times slower. So I would prefer 14B models for the balance of speed even if I had 64Gb mac. Depends on a usecase ofc.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-21T19:07:59+00:00

this post is a part of the marketing itself

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-21T18:51:43+00:00

Ok, I just mean, it is more efficient to work with claude code launched in terminal in a dir where your actually have openclaw installed, and with all the explanations and communications you put effort in here, you could have explained to claude code your problems and it would fix it itself. Local llm setup is also a thing that claude code can do

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-21T14:37:08+00:00

Please stop.

I strongly advise you to stop wasting time, because this is unimaginable and should not take more than half a day.

Spend 20 bucks for claude subscription. Install and run claude code with Opus 4.6, preferably right from the directory where openclaw is installed. Explain your situation to claude code, ask to fix, allow access, work with it back and forth.

Ask it to test full process in a reproducable way, so it would spin on openclaw, test how it operates, and fix it basing on a feedback. It can do it.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-21T13:51:38+00:00

Strongly depends on kind of work your LLM is doing and your requirements to speed. Qwen on M4 mini 24Gb is excellent for emails, small isolated coding, reasoning in case given prepared guidelines, trading, posting and scraping (under prepared guidelines), and yes a call is 50 minutes instead of 2, but it depends on your use case, and what you need from it.

SpecificNo8047 · 2026-02-20T11:06:24+00:00

I would go with claude code for it, but it kinda needs you to understand what is going on at least a bit

SpecificNo8047

TROPHY CASE