Silent Cost of Memory Leaks in Production Scrapers

Memory leaks in production scrapers don't crash—they quietly inflate infrastructure costs from 1GB to 4GB per run, often undetected for weeks. This analysis of 968 real Trustpilot scraping runs identifies three patterns accounting for 90% of memory issues: unbounded asyncio queues, dynamic regex compilation bypassing Python's cache, and BeautifulSoup object retention in long-lived collections. Understanding these patterns enables developers to diagnose and fix hidden performance drains before they compound operational costs.