PageNavigation constructor: 2 seconds delay BEFORE sending the Page.navigate message to the browser (keepAlive problem?)

[nevez]

Hello,

I'm using chrome-php 1.11.0 with "keepAlive" to generate quite a lot of PDFs, the performance I get is a bit on the slow side (2 seconds to navigate to the page, while if I open the page on the browser directly it gets loaded in .2 secs).

So I investigated a bit and found that 99% of the navigation time is spent before even sending the "Page.navigate" message to the browser, it is spent on this line of PageNavigation.php, inside its __construct() method:

        // make sure latest loaderId was pulled
        $page->getSession()->getConnection()->readData();

That readData() triggers an fread() on the socket that lasts almost 1.9 seconds, and returns these bytes (this is only the first part):

......{"method":"Page.lifecycleEvent","params":{"frameId":"4D165D5C6D26BE5D7D19194C6AD3BC43","loaderId":"D14903F279C2FA2B3C7B35E5687F62A1","name":"networkAlm

hexdump of the received buffer: 817e00e97b226d6574686f64223a22506167652e6c6966656379636c654576656e74222c22706172616d73223a7b226672616d654964223a223444313635443543364432364245354437443139313934

Is this kind of delay normal? Is it a problem of chrome responding slowly or the way Wrench handles sockets? Is there anything I can do in terms of chrome command line options or in the way I use chrome-php to reduce this fixed ~2 sec pre-delay?

Thank you

[nevez]

Has anybody else measured with microtime() the execution time of that line of PageNavigation.php? Do you see the same ~2 seconds delay I see?

[divinity76]

definitely not normal, no.
OS? php version?

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[nevez]

@divinity76 Sorry for the delay in answering. I'm using lubuntu 24.04.2 LTS and PHP 8.3.17. Also tested on a production server with ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS and PHP 8.1.31, same behaviour and interestingly same delay even if the production VM is much faster, so it appears to be a fixed delay.

I timed the delay with these two lines:

public function __construct(Page $page, string $url, bool $strict = false)
    {
        // make sure latest loaderId was pulled
        $t = microtime(true);
        $page->getSession()->getConnection()->readData();
        error_log('ELAPSED: '.(microtime(true) - $t));

And I get these delays:

ELAPSED: 1.9348068237305
ELAPSED: 1.9597678184509
ELAPSED: 1.9418430328369
ELAPSED: 1.9539520740509

Tested both with google-chrome and brave-browser, same results.

It might be related to the "keepAlive" property, because on first execution the delay is much less (0.34 secs on the production machine), from the second one forward it's always 1.93-1.95 secs.

This is how I create the browser:

            $browser = $factory->createBrowser([
                'keepAlive' => true,
                'ignoreCertificateErrors' => true,
                'userAgent' => 'ChromePHP',
                'customFlags' => ['--disable-crash-reporter','--disable-oopr-debug-crash-dump','--disable-breakpad']
            ]);

Once created, I save the socketUri in a file and I reuse it with BrowserFactory::connectToBrowser() on subsequent requests.

This is how I use chrome-php, to generate PDFs:

            $page = $browser->createPage();

            if ($hasSession) {
                $page->setCookies([
                    Cookie::create($sessionName, $sessionId, [
                        'domain' => $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'],
                        'path' => '/',
                        'secure' => true,
                        'httpOnly' => true,
                        'sameSite' => 'lax',
                        'expires' => time() + 10
                    ])
                ])->await();
            }
            $page->navigate($url)->waitForNavigation();
            $response = new ResponseWaiter($page->getSession()->sendMessage(new Message('Network.clearBrowserCookies')));
            $response->await();

            // pdf
            $page->pdf(['printBackground' => true, 'preferCSSPageSize' => true, 'landscape' => $landscape, 'paperWidth' => 8.27, 'paperHeight' => 11.69, 'marginTop' => 0.4, 'marginBottom' => 0.4, 'marginLeft' => 0.4, 'marginRight' => 0.4 ])->saveToFile($outFile);

Can you replicate the delay?

[stale]

This issue has been automatically marked as stale because there has been no recent activity. It will be closed after 30 days if no further activity occurs. Thank you for your contributions.

[divinity76]

Can you check if chrome-php/wrench#26 fixes it?

[nevez]

Yes! I can confirm that the fix works