I've been struggling to run multiple instances of Puppeteer on DigitalOcean for quite some time with little luck. I'm able to run ~5 concurrently using tools like puppeteer-cluster, but for some reason the whole thing just chokes with little helpful messaging. So, I switched to spawning ~5 child processes without any additional library -- just Puppeteer itself. Same issue. Chokes with no helpful errors.
I'm able to run all of these jobs just fine locally, but after I deploy, I hit these walls. So, my hunch is that it's a resource/performance issue, but I can't say for sure.
I'm running a droplet with 1GB and 3CPUs on Digital Ocean.
Basically, I'm just looking for ways to start troubleshooting something like this. is there a way I can know for sure that I'm hitting resource walls? I've tried pm2 and the DO dashboard graphs, but I feel like those are all leaving a lot of information out, or else I'm missing something else altogether.
Author of puppeteer-cluster here. You are right, 1 GB of memory is likely not enough for running 5 browser windows (or tabs) in addition to your operating system and maybe even other background tasks.
Here is a list of resources you should check:
- Memory: Use a tool like
htop to check your memory usage while your application is running.
- CPU: Again, you can use
htop for that, 3 vCPUs should be more than enough for 5 windows.
- Disk space: Use a tool like
df to check if there is enough space on the disk. I know of multiple cases in which there was not enough space on the disk (like some old kernels filling the disk), and Chrome needs at least some space to run.
- Network throughput: Rarely the problem, but sometimes the network just does not have the bandwidth to support many open browser. Use a tool like
nload to check the network throughput.
To use htop or nload, you start your script in the background (node script.js &) or use a terminal multiplexer (like tmux). Resource problems should then be easy to spot.
Most probably you're running out of memory, 5 puppeteer processes are a lot for a 1GB VM.
You can run
grep -i 'killed process' /var/log/messages
to confirm that the OOM killer terminated your processes.
