We checkpoint Chrome to NVMe and restore it in 500ms ()

2 points

2 months ago

We've been building browser infrastructure for AI agents. The problem everyone hits: you spin up Chrome, log into something, do some work, and then what?

Keep the VM running at $30/month doing nothing, or kill it and lose the session.

We wanted to freeze Chrome to disk when it's idle and bring it back exactly where it left off. Turns out this is hard. After a lot of trial and error with different browser builds and configurations, we got it working with Playwright's Chromium on Orb Cloud using CRIU.

The result: navigate to Google, pick up some cookies, take a screenshot, freeze. Wait. Restore. Same cookies, same page, identical screenshot. We ran it back-to-back on Google, Wikipedia, and Hacker News — all pass.

Orb-browser is the open source repo. It's a headless Chrome you can put to sleep. It costs nothing while sleeping, wakes in ~500ms, and everything is intact — cookies, localStorage, the page you were on. The browser doesn't know it was frozen.

If you're running browser agents that are active 5 minutes per hour, you pay for 5 minutes, not 60.

repo: https://github.com/nextbysam/orb-browser.