Agent skill · marketing growth · jeremylongshore
apify-performance-tuning
Optimize Apify Actor performance: crawl speed, memory usage, concurrency,
Why this skill is useful
Provides specific optimization strategies and code snippets for improving Apify Actor performance that the AI wouldn't reliably generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires apify-sdk installed locally. Requires apify account access. About 3k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 2,604 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
Apify Performance Tuning Overview Optimize Apify Actors for speed, cost, and reliability. Covers Crawlee concurrency settings, memory profiling, proxy rotation strategies, request batching, and crawler selection for different workloads. The workflow is a repeatable loop: measure a baseline, apply one lever, re-measure. The single highest-impact lever is usually crawler choice — swapping a browser crawler for CheerioCrawler on non-JS pages is a 5-10x speedup on its own. The full six-step walkthrough, with every code block, lives in references/implementation.md. Prerequisites Existing Actor with measurable baseline performance Understanding of apify-sdk-patterns Access to Actor run stats in Apify Console APIFYTOKEN in the environment for reading run stats via ApifyClient Instructions Work the levers in order. Each step is expanded — with copy-paste code — in the reference file linked below. 1. Measure a baseline. Pull runTimeSecs, requestsFinished, memAvgBytes, and usageTotalUsd from the run stats before changing anything. You cannot judge an optimization without a before number. 2. Choose the right crawler. HttpCrawler/CheerioCrawler for static HTML or JSON (low memory, fast); PlaywrightCrawler/PuppeteerCrawler only when the page genuinely needs JavaScript rendering. 3. Tune concurrency. Raise maxConcurrency for Cheerio (up to ~50); keep it low (~3-5) for browser crawlers because each page costs ~200MB. Let autoscaledPoolOptions adjust within the band. 4. Optimize memory. Push data immediately instead of accumulating arrays; for browser crawlers, block images/CSS/fonts in preNavigationHooks and cap concurrent browsers. 5. Right-size the memory allocation. Compute units bill on memory x duration — start low (512 MB for Cheerio) and only raise it if the Actor is memory-starved. 6. Rotate proxies and tune requests. Start on datacenter proxies, fall back to residential on 403/blocked; use a session pool for IP rotation and ban detection. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills jeremylongshore/apify-performance-tuning