Testing how long it takes Chromium to open, load a web page, and quit on Debian

Something I've long been meaning to benchmark, but never really got around to, is benchmarking the amount of time it takes on a Raspberry Pi to open a browser, load a page, and quit.

This is a relatively decent thing to benchmark, compared to other raw performance metrics, because it's something that probably 99% of Raspberry Pi users who use it with a GUI will do, with some frequency (well, probably loading more than one page before quitting, but still...).

So I asked on Twitter:

And quickly, I received a number of responses about headless chromium or selenium, which I have used before and are great—but doesn't measure the full cycle of opening a browser in the GUI, loading a page, and quitting it.

I was trying to script it with some bash, but trying to get chromium-browser to open, load a page, and exit in a way that I could time it was futile. And unlike the open command on my Mac (paired with some other tools), I couldn't figure out a way to launch Chromium, have it load a page, then drop to something else to quit it and measure the time automatically.

And there's no way I was going to go to the old school stopwatch method—too inaccurate!

Using puppeteer

One of the responses in my Twitter thread, from @ericjduran, mentioned puppeteer, a 'headless Chrome Node.js API'. I thought it might be hard to get it to work with a fully-loaded, non-headless instance, but it wasn't.

And it was a heck of a lot simpler (and faster) to configure than Selenium, which is kind of a pain to get started with (IMO).

On Raspberry Pi OS, Node.js (10.x) is preinstalled, so I didn't have to install it manually—but if you're on stock Debian, you can get it with sudo apt-get install -y nodejs npm.

To get puppeteer, or more specifically, puppeteer-core, since I didn't need the training-wheels version that downloads another copy of Chromium too, I installed it with npm:

npm install puppeteer-core

Once it was installed, I created a benchmark.js script with the following contents:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer-core');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch({
    headless: false,
    executablePath: '/usr/bin/chromium'
  });
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://www.jeffgeerling.com/');
  await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});

  await browser.close();
})();

This should work on a Raspberry Pi, and it will launch a visible Chromium browser, load the page https://www.jeffgeerling.com/ (I picked my site since it loads very fast and doesn't rely on a ton of external resources), saves a screenshot, and then closes the browser.

To run it, with timing results:

time node benchmark.js

And in action:

Puppeteer loading a site in Chromium and exiting

I'll be compiling some benchmarks pitting different USB drives against each other on a Raspberry Pi 4, and I'll be posting a video on the topic to my YouTube channel soon, so subscribe there if you want to see my results!

(Edit: I benchmarked some drives on the Raspberry Pi and here's the part that discusses browser benchmarks.)

Comments

Nice job, it works pretty fin. But just a remark under Rasp OS x64 the executablePath of chromium is: '/usr/bin/chromium-browser'
Thanks again for that entry!