My local Chrome fleet worked well until several target sites began applying stricter detection and additional checks. The same Playwright scripts now lose about half of their parallel workers, with browsers detaching mid-run and logs providing little useful information. Pinning browser versions and slowing the pacing helped only slightly, and failures become especially common when three or more jobs run at once. What tools or architecture have people found reliable under load? I'm mainly looking for boring, observable runs rather than ways to bypass access controls.
1 Answer
Before switching tools, measure whether this is actually detection or ordinary resource exhaustion. Track browser exits, memory, CPU, page-load times, and per-worker completion rates. A managed Playwright service such as Browserless or Browserbase can help with concurrency controls, session inspection, and better debugging, but compare it against your real workloads rather than assuming the hosted option fixes everything.
That makes sense. The failure threshold around three workers could easily be memory or process limits, so I’m going to capture those metrics before changing the whole stack.