Puppeteer with headless:true is extremely slow

Though this issues has been raised in https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer/issues/1550, but it was closed and the problem was not addressed.

My environment:

• Puppeteer Version: “puppeteer”: “^0.13.0”
• Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise with Service Pack 1 & command prompt

With the following minimal test script:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

const headless = process.argv[2] === "headless";

(async () => {
    const timeout = 30000
    const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
        headless: headless,
        timeout,
    });
    const page = await browser.newPage();
	const label = "Go to Bing " + (headless?"without": "with") + " head."
	console.time(label)
    await page.goto("https://www.bing.com/", { timeout })
	const title = await page.title()
	console.log("Title: " + title)
	console.timeEnd(label);
    await browser.close();
})();

headless.log head.log

To aid debugging, I turned on debugging and collected two logs: headless.log & head.log respectively.

[ChiggerChug]

Hey guys, so I’ve found a workaround for this. I found the answer in another thread unrelated to puppeteer but also has the problem with chromium being extremely slow in headless mode. I noticed that when I tried to debug chromium that network requests were the slow bit in terms of headless mode so I searched for that.

const browser = await puppeteer.launch({args: ["--proxy-server='direct://'", '--proxy-bypass-list=*']})

When launching the browser add these 2 arguments to the list and it seems (for me anyway) to resolve all issues with speed.

Link to thread if you’re interested: https://github.com/Codeception/CodeceptJS/issues/561 and props to oligee80 (who found the answer) for saving me about a week of work rolling back a bunch of product releases! 🎉

[MaDetho]

Try setting a valid UserAgent. This worked for me.

await page.setUserAgent('Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/69.0.3497.100 Safari/537.36')