Crawler¶

The crawler travels through your site, refreshing pages that have expired in the cache. This makes it less likely that your visitors will encounter uncached pages.

The crawler must be enabled at the server-level or the virtual host level by a site admin. Please see: Enabling the Crawler at the Server or Virtual Host Level

Learn more about crawling on our blog.

Summary Tab¶

Crawler Cron¶

See the progress of the various crawlers enabled for your site. You can monitor the progress of each crawler via the color-coded rectangles in the Status column.

Use the Reset Position button to start the crawler at the beginning again.

Use the Manually run button to start the crawler without waiting for the cron job.

Status Key¶

• Gray, Waiting to be Crawled: the page is in the queue to be crawled
• Green, Cache Hit: the page is already cached, so the crawler skipped it
• Blue, Cache Miss: the page was not already cached, so the crawler has cached it
• Red, Blocklisted: the page cannot be crawled (See the Blocklist section for more information.)

Watch Crawler Status¶

If you've opted to watch the crawler status, your screen will look something like the image below. The messages in the status window will vary from site to site.

Here is an explanation of some of the terms:

• Size: The number of URLs in the sitemap. This example has 181.
• Crawler: Indicates which crawler number you are watching. It's number 1 in this example. There could be multiple crawlers working, depending on your settings.
• Position: The URL number currently being fetched from the sitemap list.
• Threads: Indicates the number of threads currently being used to fetch URLs. There may be multiple threads fetching. It is smart and will adjust based on your load settings.
• Status: Indicates the current crawler status. In this example, Stopped due to reset meta position means that the site purged or the sitemap changed while it was crawling, and as such, the crawler will restart from the top.

Map Tab¶

Sitemap List¶

This page displays the URIs currently in the crawler map. If you don't see any listed, try pressing the Refresh Crawler Map button.

You can search for a particular URL, which is helpful if your sitemap is large.

You can filter your URL list to only display those with a particular cache status (Cache Hit or Cache Miss) or those that have been added to the blocklist (Blocklisted). Click the corresponding link to do so.

You can manually add URIs to the blocklist via the button next to each entry.

The Crawler Status column uses colored dots to give you the status of each URI. See below the table for the key.

To start from scratch with the crawler map, press the Clean Crawler Map button.

Blocklist Tab¶

Blocklist¶

This page displays the URIs currently in the blocklist.

From here you can manually remove URIs from the blocklist via the button next to each entry.

The Status column uses colored dots to give you the status of each URI. See below the table for the key.

To start from scratch and clear out the blocklist, press the Empty Blocklist button.

Settings Tab¶

Crawler¶

OFF

Set the to ON to enable crawling for this site.

Delay¶

The crawler sends requests to the backend, one page after another, as it traverses your site. This can put a heavy load on your server if there is no pause between requests. The Delay (in microseconds) lets LSCache know how often to send a new request to the server.

This setting may be limited at the server level. Learn more about limiting the crawler's impact on the server.

define('LITESPEED_CRAWLER_USLEEP', $delay);

Run Duration¶

In order to keep your server from getting bogged-down with behind-the-scenes crawling, we put limits on the crawling duration. This setting has been deprecated in LSCWP v7. Run Duration is now set to a maximum of 900 seconds and is not editable.

Interval Between Runs¶

This setting determines the length of the break mentioned above. By default, the crawler rests for 600 seconds in between every 400-second run.

define('LITESPEED_CRAWLER_RUN_INTERVAL', $interval);

Crawl Interval¶

302400

How often do you want to re-initiate the crawling process? This depends on how long it takes to crawl your site. The best way to figure this out is to run the crawler a couple of times and keep track of the elapsed time. Once you’ve got that amount, set Crawl Interval to slightly more than that. For example, if your crawler routinely takes 4 hours to complete a run, you could set the interval to 5 hours (or 18000 seconds).

Threads¶

When Threads is set to the default of 3, then there are three separate crawling processes happening concurrently. The higher the number, the faster your site is crawled, but also the more load that is put on your server.

define('LITESPEED_CRAWLER_THREADS', $threads);

Timeout¶

The crawler has this many seconds to crawl a page before moving on to the next page. Value defaults to 30 seconds.

define('LITESPEED_CRAWLER_TIMEOUT', $timeout);

Server Load Limit¶

1

This setting is a way to keep the crawler from monopolizing system resources. Once the server's load average reaches this limit, the crawler will be terminated, rather than allowing it to compromise server performance. Set Server Load LImit to 0 to prevent the crawler from running.

Role Simulation¶

Empty list

By default, the crawler runs as a non-logged-in "guest" on your site. As such, the pages that are cached by the crawler are all for non-logged-in users. If you would like to also pre-cache logged-in views, you may do so here.

The crawler simulates a user account when it runs, so you need to specify user id numbers that correspond to the roles you'd like to cache.

For security purposes, some restrictions have been enacted for Role Simulation as of version 7:

• It may not be run for any userid that has Editor privileges or higher
• It is limited to the Server IP

You may crawl multiple points-of-view by entering multiple user ids in the box, one per line.

Cookie Simulation¶

To crawl for a particular cookie, enter the cookie name, and the values you wish to crawl for. Values should be one per line, and can include a blank line. There will be one crawler created per cookie value, per simulated role. Press the + button to add additional cookies, but be aware the number of crawlers grows quickly with each new cookie, and can be a drain on system resources.

There aren't many situations where you would need to simulate a cookie crawler, but it can be useful for sites that use a cookie to control multiple languages or currencies.

Drop Domain from Sitemap¶

The crawler will parse the sitemap and save it into the database before crawling. When parsing the sitemap, dropping the domain can save DB storage. This setting is enabled by default.

define('LITESPEED_CRAWLER_DROP_DOMAIN', false);

Sitemap Timeout¶

This setting specifies the number of seconds before timing out, while parsing the sitemap. It is set to 120 seconds by default

define('LITESPEED_CRAWLER_MAP_TIMEOUT', $timeout);