+++ date = "2017-08-01T11:51:52+03:00" author = "Alan Orth" title = "August, 2017" tags = ["Notes"]

+++

2017-08-01

• Linode sent an alert that CGSpace (linode18) was using 350% CPU for the past two hours
• I looked in the Activity pane of the Admin Control Panel and it seems that Google, Baidu, Yahoo, and Bing are all crawling with massive numbers of bots concurrently (~100 total, mostly Baidu and Google)
• The good thing is that, according to dspace.log.2017-08-01, they are all using the same Tomcat session
• This means our Tomcat Crawler Session Valve is working
• But many of the bots are browsing dynamic URLs like:
  • /handle/10568/3353/discover
  • /handle/10568/16510/browse
• The robots.txt only blocks the top-level /discover and /browse URLs... we will need to find a way to forbid them from accessing these!
• Relevant issue from DSpace Jira (semi resolved in DSpace 6.0): https://jira.duraspace.org/browse/DS-2962
• It turns out that we're already adding the X-Robots-Tag "none" HTTP header, but this only forbids the search engine from indexing the page, not crawling it!
• Also, the bot has to successfully browse the page first so it can receive the HTTP header...
• We might actually have to block these requests with HTTP 403 depending on the user agent
• Abenet pointed out that the CGIAR Library Historical Archive collection I sent July 20th only had ~100 entries, instead of 2415
• This was due to newline characters in the dc.description.abstract column, which caused OpenRefine to choke when exporting the CSV
• I exported a new CSV from the collection on DSpace Test and then manually removed the characters in vim using g/^$/d
• Then I cleaned up the author authorities and HTML characters in OpenRefine and sent the file back to Abenet