time to first result, any way to speed up?

Hey,

thank you for considering this actor.

There are several steps between launching the actor and seeing first results:

1. downloading and starting Docker container
2. initializing the actor (parsing input, geolocation, initializing crawler, etc)
3. launching browser (this is probably the slowest part)

You can try our other actor - Google Maps Extractor - it doesn't use browser so you should see the first results sooner, after about 12-15 seconds.

We will discuss it with team whether we can optimize it some more.

Yes I understand spinning up the container in a Kubernetes cluster isn't instant and can be in fact quite slow. My day job is backend dev (python/django/C#)/DevOps for a couple EKS clusters I created. If launching the browser is the slowest part, not a lot can be done there except optimize the actual hardware it's running on (guessing that prioritizing singled threaded CPU performance could 2x the launch speed compared to a traditional server CPU like modern EPYC/Xeon). Does each request to google for one of the map segments ("INFO Splitted the map into 148 map segments") use a different proxy and would therefore require a new browser instance to be launched?

I suppose I should start thinking about potentially doing the place collection asynchronously (e.g. 1x per week) and have places where I launch my app "pre-scraped".

Does each request to google for one of the map segments ("INFO Splitted the map into 148 map segments") use a different proxy and would therefore require a new browser instance to be launched?

I don't know the exact details but the browser gets restarted every 20 requests or so (e.g. to clear cache). Each request has assigned a proxy from proxy pool. After request completion, the proxy goes back to the pool and gets reused couple of times before it's discarded.