I’m trying to gather info from a big online store. I made a scraper using a headless browser and Puppeteer, but it’s super slow. It takes like 2-3 hours for just 2000 items! That’s way too long.
I thought maybe using the site’s API with GraphQL might be faster, but I’m new to GraphQL and can’t figure it out. Does anyone have tips for speeding up data collection from websites? Or maybe some pointers on using GraphQL for this kind of thing?
I really want to make this process quicker and more efficient. Any advice would be awesome! Thanks in advance for your help.
Have you considered using a distributed scraping approach? I’ve had success with this method for large-scale data extraction. Essentially, you’d split the workload across multiple machines or cloud instances. This parallelization can significantly reduce overall scraping time.
For implementation, you could use a task queue system like Celery with Redis as a message broker. Each worker would handle a subset of the URLs. This approach allowed me to scale from hours to minutes for similar-sized datasets.
If API access is available, that’s generally preferable to scraping. For GraphQL, start by examining the network requests in your browser’s dev tools while browsing the site. This can reveal the query structure. From there, you can replicate these queries in your code using a GraphQL client library.
Remember to respect the site’s terms of service and implement rate limiting to avoid overloading their servers.
yo, have u tried using asyncio with aiohttp? its pretty sweet for speeding up scraping. i managed to get like 5000 items in 30 mins with it. just gotta be careful not to hammer the site too hard ya know? also, check out request-promise if ur into nodejs. its dope for handling multiple requests at once
I’ve been in your shoes, and I found that using Scrapy was a game-changer for me. It’s way faster than Puppeteer for large-scale scraping tasks. With Scrapy, I managed to extract data from about 10,000 items in just an hour.
One trick that really boosted my efficiency was implementing concurrent requests. Scrapy allows you to set the CONCURRENT_REQUESTS parameter, which lets you make multiple requests simultaneously.
Another thing that helped was fine-tuning my selectors. XPath selectors are typically faster than CSS selectors, so I switched to those where possible.
As for GraphQL, it can be tricky at first, but it’s worth learning. I’d suggest using a tool like GraphiQL to explore the API structure. It gives you an interactive way to build and test queries.
Remember to be respectful of the website’s resources and check their robots.txt file for any scraping guidelines. Good luck with your project!