I run AiSeek , an information platform where every published claim has to trace back to fetched evidence — a source page, a filing, a dataset. That makes the fetch layer the supply chain of the whole product: if it is slow, wasteful, or silently wrong, everything downstream inherits it.

Until October 21, that layer was Crawl4AI — a capable, popular Python framework — driving Chromium for the pages that needed rendering. I had a feeling it was heavy. Instead of trusting the feeling, I audited it: three days of production jobs (8,563 of them, October 18–20), the production database, and local reproductions run under the same limits as the production box (6 cores, 10 GB).…