v1.2.0 — Lazy Browser Lifecycle + Reliability

Before 1.2.0, camofox-browser kept Firefox alive 24/7 — ~550MB resident even with zero users. That's fine on a dedicated server, not so much on a Raspberry Pi, a $5 VPS, or Railway's shared infra.

Now the browser sleeps. It launches on the first real request, shuts down after 5 minutes idle, and relaunches instantly when needed. Health checks won't wake it. Combined with the V8 heap cap (default 128MB), idle memory drops to ~40MB.

If a page hangs, it gets killed — not the server. Per-user concurrency limits mean one heavy session can't starve everyone else. The server stays responsive even when individual pages don't.

Designed to share a box with the rest of your stack.

Lazy Browser Lifecycle

• Browser launches on first request, not at startup
• Idle shutdown kills the browser after 5 minutes with no active sessions. Next request relaunches automatically.
• Health checks are passive — /health reports state without waking the browser
• Launch mutex prevents double-launching on concurrent requests
• 30s launch timeout prevents a hung process from blocking the server

Reliability

• Handler timeouts — 30s cap on navigate, snapshot, click, back, forward, refresh, act
• Per-user concurrency — max 3 concurrent requests per user with queuing
• Safe page close — 5s timeout cap on page.close()
• Browser auto-reconnect — detects dead browser, clears stale sessions, relaunches
• ariaSnapshot hardening — 5s timeout, returns empty refs on failure instead of propagating
• Navigate auto-creates tabs — unknown tabId creates a session+tab instead of 404

New Configuration

Environment variables:

Variable	Default	Description
HANDLER_TIMEOUT_MS	30000	Max time for any handler
MAX_CONCURRENT_PER_USER	3	Concurrent request cap per user
BROWSER_IDLE_TIMEOUT_MS	300000	Kill browser when idle (5min)
MAX_OLD_SPACE_SIZE	128	Node.js V8 heap limit (MB)

OpenClaw plugin config:

{
  "browserIdleTimeoutMs": 300000,
  "maxOldSpaceSize": 128
}

Thanks

• @daijro for Camoufox