Data is crucial to the survival of any business in today’s digitalized world. Yet collecting bad data can cause several problems. For one, it can lead to losses. It is estimated that bad data cost US businesses alone over $600 billion each year.
One of the most common reasons data can be bad is collecting too slowly and too many errors.
The figure above implies the severity and frequency of this incidence. There is, therefore, the need to find ways to collect the right data.
Using tools such as Puppeteer will help to speed up data collection through parallelization and ensure that what you are getting is data collected in real-time and with very few errors.
While several tools can help you perform parallel web scraping, not many of them allow you to do it while minimizing errors.
Explanation of What Puppeteer Is
As data becomes more important and more abundant, developers seek to create easier and less complex ways of extracting this data.
At Google, developers came together to create Puppeteer, a library for controlling Chrome remotely.
Since both tools are owned and managed by Google, using Puppeteer to run Chrome implies that there would be no third-party involved, and seeing how Chrome is the most used web browser, you can be sure of getting several features and functions at your disposal.
Puppeteer can be used to control Chrome without a Graphical User Interface. A Chrome browser without the visual elements is often called headless Chrome, and using it translates into enjoying all the capacity and functionalities of Chrome without interacting directly with the DevTools protocol.
Some of the most popular applications of this duo are web scraping and web testing, which can both be automated to reduce the time and energy you spend doing these tasks.
Unique Features of Puppeteer and Benefits of Puppeteer Tutorial
There are some unique features about Puppeteer that make the tool highly beneficial, and below are some of the most common.
- Automated Operations
Puppeteer allows full automation for several tasks, including User Interface (UI) testing, mouse operation, keyboard input, and form submission.
This means that every activity a regular user can perform on a website can be easily replicated and emulated by Puppeteer.
This is crucial for testing, which allows you to identify issues before the users see them after launch.
And the best part is these operations can all be automated to save you time and increase the accuracy of the results.
- Screenshots Generation
Another unique thing about Puppeteer is how it can take and generate screenshots.
This is valuable in several ways but is mostly used to ensure proper testing and maintenance.
You can check for issues, take a screenshot and commence fixing the particular issue while taking more screenshots to check progress and keep a proper record.
- Server-Side Rendering (SSR)
This feature helps you easily crawl a single-page application and generate pre-rendered content while at it.
The main benefit here is that it reduces the workload on a given server and helps to speed up the process of web scraping while protecting the server against crashes.
What Are The Disposing Resources Used In Parallelization?
Using Puppeteer for web scraping is attractive because it offers several advantages, such as automation and rendering of JavaScript content, which many libraries and scraping bots may fail to achieve.
But Puppeteer offers even more advantages as it allows you to scrape from multiple pages simultaneously. This is tied to the ability to open multiple tabs on the headless Chrome you are working with while automating the actual scraping process.
This is called parallelization and is considered one of the best ways to speed up a web scraping exercise. So that rather than waiting to scrape one URL at a time, you can include the feature while writing your script and have the browser open multiple links and scrape from them simultaneously.
But without taking necessary precautions, parallelization may be less successful or may not work at all. For instance, because you need to scrape multiple websites simultaneously, the scraping may require too much memory. When you use more memory than your device can allow, the operations may stop, and the system may crash.
In order to avoid this issue, it is often advisable to initiate and use the many disposing resources available in the Puppeteer package.
Some of these disposing resources include:
- Running In Parallel
One of the easiest disposing resources to use is Promise.al, which allows you to run multiple things in parallel to access and render JavaScript.
The resource is in-built and has a simple structure that can scrape multiple sources without errors.
- Bluebird Promise.map
This resource works just like the one above but is often not in-built and may need to be enabled through the settings.
However, once enabled, you can define how many elements you want running simultaneously and enable others to start once the initial elements are done running automatically.
How to Deal With Errors in Scraping With Parallelization
Using the above resources will help guarantee a smooth parallel web scraping and speed up the data collection rate.
However, even the tiniest errors can interrupt the process and terminate any extraction that has been achieved because you wouldn’t want this, it is also important to learn how to manage and deal with errors while taking any Puppeteer tutorial.
The best way to deal with errors during parallelization is to modify the error or result field during the scripting to ensure that errors are handled and dealt with at the page level. That way, it does not slip into the general results to terminate the process.
Conclusion
The beauty of running a headless Chrome browser is that you can initiate parallelization by opening multiple tabs at once and scraping from multiple sources simultaneously.
However, you must ensure you do this properly to catch errors early and treat them to prevent discarding the entire result.