xikhar/spiderbench
Use SpiderBench to get reproducible performance data for Node.js crawlers without writing custom timing code.
The repository provides a ready‑to‑run benchmark suite aimed at measuring the performance of web‑crawling agents written in JavaScript. By supplying a set of URLs and optional request parameters, users can spin up a crawl job and let the framework drive the execution while it records timing and system usage.
Under the hood SpiderBench ships a command‑line driver that parses a JSON‑based workload description, spawns a configurable number of concurrent fetch workers, and hooks into Node's event loop to collect timestamps. A lightweight plug‑in system lets contributors add custom reporters or replace the HTTP client without touching the core runner.
It targets anyone who builds or maintains scrapers, headless browsers, or data‑extraction pipelines, particularly performance engineers who need to quantify the impact of code changes or compare alternative libraries. Because the tool is pure JavaScript, it integrates smoothly with existing CI pipelines and can be extended with npm packages.
The project has already gathered over 250 stars, indicating a strong appetite for standardized crawler benchmarking. Community contributions focus on adding new workload templates and visual dashboards, suggesting that developers see SpiderBench as a reference point for performance regression testing and as a baseline for research on crawling efficiency.
TakeawaySpiderBench delivers a plug‑in‑driven Node.js benchmark harness that records latency, throughput, and resource metrics for web‑crawler workloads.