Alternatives if development has stopped?

Questions and answers about anything related to Helium Scraper
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Shaden
Posts: 10
Joined: Wed Aug 21, 2013 6:37 pm

Alternatives if development has stopped?

Post by Shaden » Mon Sep 01, 2014 8:07 pm

Hi all,

I just want to say that I love Helium Scraper. However, I was forced to upgrade to Windows 8.1, which causes me to not be able to use IE10 which Helium Scraper relies on. I believe that when Helium Scraper uses IE11, there is a massive memory leak which causes my 16GB RAM computer to run out of resources on simply scrapes within an hour. I have not seen a mod/developer post or a blog update in over a month (last time the webmaster account logged into the forums was July 15th) and nothing regarding Windows 8.1 or IE11 ever, so I believe development may have stopped on Helium Scraper (I hope the developer is ok). Therefore, does anyone have any recommendations on:

1) How to stop the memory leak
2) Alternative programs to use? I have been testing some of the programs out on the following site, but nothing seems to do what I need except for Helium. http://scraping.pro/software-for-web-scraping/

Thanks,
-David

yeti
Posts: 22
Joined: Sat Feb 02, 2013 1:01 am

Re: Alternatives if development has stopped?

Post by yeti » Mon Sep 08, 2014 9:41 am

It's a shame this forum is not very active, and no input from the devs, as a forum is probably the best way for people to help each other out, without having to deal with individual support tickets for every question (which is how I believe they work).

I suffer from the memory leak too, also on a 16GB high spec machine, but I have managed to work around it by simplifying what I am scraping (not the best solution).

There arent many other decent scrapers like this, I have tried lots of alternatives (2 years ago now, so I cant remember which exactly, but most were crap).

I think the best way to scrape is to build a bespoke system using Python/php or something similar. I had a guy helping me with this some time ago, which worked great, but the project kind of got abandoned after a while for various reasons.

I am now using Helium for basic scraping needs, but struggling in a few areas, with lack of help.

Cheers!

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