ASelenium-based scraper hits 4GB of RAM consumption after roughly 2,500 page accesses. Not 25,000. Not 250,000. Twenty-five hundred.
Run that scraper at 100,000 pages per hour and you're restarting infrastructure every few minutes. Memory accumulates like sediment. Each session leaves traces. Every JavaScript execution, every DOM manipulation, every cookie jar adds weight that never fully clears.
The math is brutal and predictable. What monitors a dozen competitor sites breaks completely when tracking inventory across thousands of SKUs. Your infrastructure doesn't crash spectacularly. It just consumes resources nobody budgeted for, forcing restart orchestration that becomes its own operational burden.
