Making changes to Chromium source to optimize headless chrome CPU usage

[Nicholas DiPiazza]

Headless chrome eats up a surprisingly high amount of CPU. I am using Chrome headless javscript evaluation.

In my use case I'm just trying to get the HTML source of a page after javascript has been evaluated. This allows me to ignore a lot of things that might be CPU heavy.

I have already implemented DevTools interceptors to avoid loading CSS, Images, Videos, and more.

Here are my command line options to chromium:

    "--enable-logging",
    "--v=1",
    "--no-sandbox",
    "--disable-bundled-ppapi-flash",
    "--mute-audio",
    "--hide-scrollbars"

It's still pretty gosh darn CPU heavy, however.

I have a couple ideas how to optimize headless further. 

 - Per website, detect javascript imports that are CPU heavy but provide nothing to javascript output.

    This can help a lot, but it's specific to each site so not that great.

 - Make modification to chromium rendering and javascript engine such that it will skip anything that is inapplicable in a headless javascript evaluation scenario.

Has anyone got any other ideas or pointers how I can go about this last bullet? 

[Nicholas DiPiazza]

Anyone have any ideas on this? I'm just looking for some more views hopefully some ideas can be brainstormed.

[bruce...@chromium.org]

Have you profiled to see where the CPU time is going? There are hundreds of possibilities as to what might be causing the excessive CPU consumption. perf on Linux, Instruments on OSX, or ETW on Windows can tell you where time is going so that you can decide what, if anything, can be changed.

[Nicholas DiPiazza]

Hey Bruce thanks for the reply. Profiling sounds like it's the way to go.

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