UIV as iMacros alternative: Can UI.Vision RPA run as fast as iMacros 8.9.7?

UI.Vision RPA
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I’m a long-term iMacros user, I tried UI.Vision RPA few months ago and it was much slower compared to iMacros 8.9.7, so I stick to iMacros.

Today, I was thinking maybe I missed some configuration tricks in UI.Vision RPA to make it faster.

For example, in iMacros if you want it to run really fast, you should hide sidebar with F8 key and set imacros-js:showsteps: no and maybe minimize window to skip screen rendering. Those trick would make iMacros very fast.

Are there similar trick in UI.Vision RPA? Can UI.Vision RPA run as fast as iMacros 8.9.7?

Thanks in advance! :smiley:

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@acajoo

I have been using imacros for 10 years and for 2 years ui vision and with a lot of study you can do the same automations with both.

Imacros is easier to use but has fewer commands.

For the very simple jobs I can do with an old firefox brower ESR 52 imacros use (works all day and requires little memory), for the most modern jobs I use Ui vision with firefox 81 (I use an updated browser for security and I can automate modern sites as well).

Ui vision disadvantages:
Slow (I set speed fast and timeout 1 seconds)
Code macro more complex (need multiple line)
No relative position (xpath)
For some command require xmodules (need installed in machine)
Free user limited xclick/xtype
Sometimes not work for random bug (IPC or kantu is not connect to browser tab)

Imacros disadvantages:
Work in old firefox only
Have not image recognition
Have not a solution to counts csv line (you must know the loop number)
Have not IF/ELSE/REPEAT
Can not automate addons, bar menu, internal browser page
Have not desktop automation

Some sites cannot be automated with imacros as they are incompatible with firefox 56 and you have to visit them with updated browsers, for example github requires a modern browser so using ui vision is mandatory if you want to automate everything today.

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Thank you for your answer. I did my own reasearch and testing and I found that UI.Vision RPA runs fastest on Edge, after that goes Chrome and then far behind Firefox. All browsers run fastest UI.Vision RPA when I select “No Log” option and no scroll and no highlighting elements. My test was reading data from 100 table cells. It takes approx. 7 seconds to finish this task on fastest Edge browser. What is kind of depressing is that it takes 0.7 seconds to finish this job using iMacros 8.9.7 and PaleMoon, thats 10x faster!

Considering that I have jobs when my macro needs to read this amount of data from 100 webpages, I need a better performance, so I’m very interested are there any other hacks to boost UI.Vision RPA performance?

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A good way to give speed o ui vision is disable images, videos, java and all ads (you can do this with addon adguard for firefox) after switch to firefox portable and run in same time multiple firefox instance + macro and every firefox complete a part of work.

In this mode you can have a excellent speed and in same time execute multiple macros.

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Unfortunately, test is working on already loaded page, so even if I disable images, videos, ads etc. it’s still slower 10x.

BUT, I managed to accelerate UI.Vision RPA data extraction in this test from 7 seconds to 0.13 seconds, thats even faster than iMacros 0.7 seconds :smiley:

Instead of using storeText 100 times, I used executeScript with:

const myNodeList = document.querySelectorAll("#transfers > div.table-responsive.mb-2.mb-md-0 > table > tbody > tr > td:nth-child(5)");
const myDomArray = Array.from(myNodeList);
const myProperArray = myDomArray.map((el) => {return el.innerText});
return myProperArray;

This returns array of 100 table cells text at the speed of light :stuck_out_tongue:

3 Likes
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I use both ui vision and imacros and while uiv is a great imacros alternative in my imacros tests it is much faster.

Imacros I perform it in a browser that requires only 200 mega ram (firefox ESR 52) macros are so fast that you can not even see what it does.

I made gabbers and they are so fast that you can not see, in a few seconds they extract hundreds of data at the speed of light.

Ui vision, on the other hand, is slow and you can see that it takes a long time to execute the various commands.

I use only portable browser, no browser installed in machine.