Up to 28 % less memory with shared browsers
Eight and thirty-two sessions on one machine: bauta's personas sharing browsers, beside stock Playwright with a browser in a window per session.
Each bauta persona is a context of its own, and the gateway puts up to eight of them in one browser. We measured what that saves against stock Playwright running a browser in a window per session, on one machine, on October 21, 2026.
How we measured
- Each session opens one of six real sites: Wikipedia, BBC News, GitHub, Hacker News, Stack Overflow and Amazon.
- Memory is the sum of every process's PSS, ten seconds after the last page loaded.
- bauta runs as it does by default, up to eight personas to a browser, on the gateway's virtual display. The
personas are made from the public
win-intelpersona. - Stock Playwright 1.60.0 runs its full Chromium in windows on a virtual display, a browser per session, each page the size of a bauta persona's.
- Both run with Chromium's sandbox off, so that every process can be read.
Results
| sessions | bauta, shared browsers | stock Playwright, a browser per session | saved |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 2,387 MB | 3,338 MB | 28 % |
| 32 | 9,360 MB | 11,675 MB | 20 % |
At 32 sessions bauta ran four browsers of eight personas each, its default.
How sharing works
A shared browser holds personas whose fonts, locale and screen scale match. Each persona still has its own
User-Agent, Client Hints, timezone, proxy and storage, and a client sees only its own persona's pages, as if the
browser were its own. A shared browser that crashes takes its personas with it and no others; each starts again on
its next connection. --per-browser 1 gives every persona a browser of its own.
Try it
The gateway explains --per-browser and the endpoints, and
Getting started runs your first persona.