[Feature]: Option to disable inspect.stack() calls for performance optimization

[jl-martins]

🚀 Feature Request

Summary

playwright-python currently makes frequent calls to inspect.stack, which significantly impacts performance in certain use cases, such as web scraping with scrapy-playwright. This feature request proposes adding an option to disable stack inspections to improve execution speed when debugging information is not required.

Use case

Although Playwright is primarily designed for end-to-end testing, some projects leverage it for web scraping, where performance is a key concern. In my case, I am using scrapy-playwright, and profiling results from cProfile indicate that inspect.stack calls contribute to roughly 25% of the total execution time, as illustrated in the following icicle and call graph:

As far as I can tell, these calls are primarily used for debugging and are not critical for normal execution.

Proposed solution

Introduce an environment variable (e.g.: PW_INSPECT_STACK) that allows users to disable stack inspections when debugging is not required. The default value would be 1 to preserve the current behavior.

Motivation

• Performance Boost: Reducing unnecessary function calls can significantly speed up Playwright for scraping-heavy applications.
• Flexibility: Users who require stack traces for debugging can leave the option enabled.
• Backward Compatibility: The default behavior remains unchanged, ensuring no disruption for existing users.

[luisferreira93]

+1