[BUG] Memory increases when same context is used

Currently the objects for e.g. request/response/route get only flushed when a new context is created

I think being able to have the page flush responses when new ones are received would be a useful feature, and along the lines of the way a typical browser handles responses. Maybe have it as a flag we can set?

While headless browsers have their origins in browser testing, and browser testing continues to be a major use case, data science is a rapidly growing field, and scraping is a major selling point for using headless browsers.

When scraping, you may not want to create an entirely new context with each data retrieval, as the cookies may be important for storing complex states or tokens. This leads to difficulties with the current Playwright implementation. Scrapers are primarily needed when lightweight APIs aren’t available or practical, and unfortunately in the modern web heavy pages of multiple megabytes of data can be included in each response.

If you’re getting HTTP responses every two seconds, you can easily amass over 1GB of additional memory leakage within an hour if all of those responses are being stored. In my case, after 43 minutes my playwright node process crashed at 1.9GB of total memory size, with the error FATAL ERROR: CALL_AND_RETRY_LAST Allocation failed - JavaScript heap out of memory. Increasing the memory limit will only delay the issue. Being able to prevent a context from cacheing all responses would be ideal.

I have a case where I make several requests per minute, it leaks memory all over the place. I’ve tried closing pages, closing contexts, closing browsers, catching all the onClose events and reclosing everything all together, even closing the main playwright instance all the time, nothing works, it still leaks memory and at some point the GC thrashes completely with the CPU setting on fire.

Please provide and/or document a way to fully release all resources so that we can clear it out every now and then. Please don’t just focus on testing, it’s full of other use cases where playwright is needed to run long long times.