Headless Rendering SLA for AI Crawlers

Headless rendering is powerful but expensive. Without guardrails, it can slow crawls and inflate costs. Define an SLA so render jobs stay predictable.

Performance targets

• P50 render time: 3 seconds or less
• P95 render time: 8 seconds or less
• Timeout: 15 seconds per page, with retries capped at one
• Concurrency: throttle to avoid bursting origin servers

Controls

• Queueing: Send render jobs through a queue separate from regular crawls; prioritize critical URLs.
• Resource limits: Use 1 vCPU/2 GB memory per Cloud Run instance; auto scale with upper bounds.
• Caching: Store rendered HTML snapshots in GCS with version tags; reuse when Last-Modified unchanged.
• Soft 404 detection: Compare rendered DOM text length to thresholds; flag pages that load placeholders.
• Robots compliance: Respect User-agent: * directives before rendering.

Monitoring

• Track render success rate, average duration, and failure reasons (timeout, navigation error, SSR).
• Alert when failure rate >5 percent or queue delay exceeds SLA.
• Provide per-tenant analytics so high-volume customers can tune their allocation.

CrawlBot approach

CrawlBot’s renderer service runs in Cloud Run, rate limits per tenant, caches snapshots, and logs each run with a render_id. Mimic this SLA to keep headless rendering reliable.***