You're right—Chromium in headless mode tends to be unreliable on low-powered devices like the Raspberry Pi Zero 2, especially when rendering complex pages or taking repeated screenshots. The combination of limited CPU, RAM, and potential I/O bottlenecks can cause Chromium to crash or hang, which sounds like what you're experiencing.
One potential solution is to try alternative browsers or rendering tools. For simpler HTML content, wkhtmltoimage can be a good alternative. It's lighter than Chromium and can convert webpages to images without the overhead of a full browser engine. Another option is using Puppeteer or Playwright with Firefox instead of Chromium. These frameworks handle headless operations more gracefully and might introduce better error handling or retries for unstable environments.
You can also try adjusting your Chromium flags. Some flags can reduce memory usage or simplify how Chromium launches:These flags aim to reduce resource usage (--disable-dev-shm-usage, --single-process, --no-zygote) and avoid some of the issues with shared memory, which is often limited on the Pi. The --no-sandbox flag is necessary when running Chromium as root, but be cautious with it from a security standpoint.
You might also want to increase the swap size on your system. Since the Pi Zero 2 has only 512MB of RAM, Chromium might be hitting memory limits. Increasing the swap file size can help Chromium survive heavier rendering tasks, although it will come at a performance cost.
Another tool worth exploring is Multilogin. It is primarily designed for managing multiple accounts and identities securely, but it also helps with browser performance by optimizing session management and providing a stable environment for headless operations. If you’re dealing with multiple sessions or need more control over browser behavior, using Multilogin might help improve stability in your setup.
Lastly, since you're running Chromium in a script loop, consider implementing error detection and retries in your Python or Node.js script. Logging the full output of Chromium (both stdout and stderr) can also give you more detailed clues about when and why it fails.
If none of that works reliably, you may want to consider offloading the rendering process to a more powerful device and just sending the images back to the Pi for display on the eInk screen. Let me know if you'd like help setting that up.
https://multilogin.com/gateway/residential-proxies/
One potential solution is to try alternative browsers or rendering tools. For simpler HTML content, wkhtmltoimage can be a good alternative. It's lighter than Chromium and can convert webpages to images without the overhead of a full browser engine. Another option is using Puppeteer or Playwright with Firefox instead of Chromium. These frameworks handle headless operations more gracefully and might introduce better error handling or retries for unstable environments.
You can also try adjusting your Chromium flags. Some flags can reduce memory usage or simplify how Chromium launches:
Code:
chromium-browser http://localhost \ --headless \ --no-sandbox \ --disable-gpu \ --disable-software-rasterizer \ --disable-dev-shm-usage \ --single-process \ --no-zygote \ --screenshot=./pic/random.jpg \ --window-size=800,700 \ --virtual-time-budget=1000You might also want to increase the swap size on your system. Since the Pi Zero 2 has only 512MB of RAM, Chromium might be hitting memory limits. Increasing the swap file size can help Chromium survive heavier rendering tasks, although it will come at a performance cost.
Another tool worth exploring is Multilogin. It is primarily designed for managing multiple accounts and identities securely, but it also helps with browser performance by optimizing session management and providing a stable environment for headless operations. If you’re dealing with multiple sessions or need more control over browser behavior, using Multilogin might help improve stability in your setup.
Lastly, since you're running Chromium in a script loop, consider implementing error detection and retries in your Python or Node.js script. Logging the full output of Chromium (both stdout and stderr) can also give you more detailed clues about when and why it fails.
If none of that works reliably, you may want to consider offloading the rendering process to a more powerful device and just sending the images back to the Pi for display on the eInk screen. Let me know if you'd like help setting that up.
https://multilogin.com/gateway/residential-proxies/
Statistics: Posted by ehloom — Tue Apr 08, 2025 4:28 pm