I began to learn about web crawlers recently and I built a sample crawler with Ruby, Anemone, and Mongodb for storage. I'm testing the crawler on a massive public website with possibly billions of links.
The crawler.rb is indexing the correct information, although when I check the memory use in activity monitor it shows the memory constantly growing. I have only run the crawler for about 6-7 hours and the memory is showing 1.38GB for mongod and 1.37GB for the Ruby process. It seems to be growing about 100MB every hour or so.
It seems that I might have a memory leak? Is their a more optimal way I can achieve the same crawl without the memory escalating out of control so that it can run longer?
# Sample web_crawler.rb with Anemone, Mongodb and Ruby.
require 'anemone'
# do not store the page's body.
module Anemone
class Page
def to_hash
{'url' => @url.to_s,
'links' => links.map(&:to_s),
'code' => @code,
'visited' => @visited,
'depth' => @depth,
'referer' => @referer.to_s,
'fetched' => @fetched}
end
def self.from_hash(hash)
page = self.new(URI(hash['url']))
{'@links' => hash['links'].map { |link| URI(link) },
'@code' => hash['code'].to_i,
'@visited' => hash['visited'],
'@depth' => hash['depth'].to_i,
'@referer' => hash['referer'],
'@fetched' => hash['fetched']
}.each do |var, value|
page.instance_variable_set(var, value)
end
page
end
end
end
Anemone.crawl("http://www.example.com/", :discard_page_bodies => true, :threads => 1, :obey_robots_txt => true, :user_agent => "Example - Web Crawler", :large_scale_crawl => true) do | anemone |
anemone.storage = Anemone::Storage.MongoDB
#only crawl pages that contain /example in url
anemone.focus_crawl do |page|
links = page.links.delete_if do |link|
(link.to_s =~ /example/).nil?
end
end
# only process pages in the /example directory
anemone.on_pages_like(/example/) do | page |
regex = /some type of regex/
example = page.doc.css('#example_div').inner_html.gsub(regex,'') rescue next
# Save to text file
if !example.nil? and example != ""
open('example.txt', 'a') { |f| f.puts "#{example}"}
end
page.discard_doc!
end
end
I am also having a problem with this, but I am using redis as a datastore.
this is my crawler:
require "rubygems"
require "anemone"
urls = File.open("urls.csv")
opts = {discard_page_bodies: true, skip_query_strings: true, depth_limit:2000, read_timeout: 10}
File.open("results.csv", "a") do |result_file|
while row = urls.gets
row_ = row.strip.split(',')
if row_[1].start_with?("http://")
url = row_[1]
else
url = "http://#{row_[1]}"
end
Anemone.crawl(url, options = opts) do |anemone|
anemone.storage = Anemone::Storage.Redis
puts "crawling #{url}"
anemone.on_every_page do |page|
next if page.body == nil
if page.body.downcase.include?("sometext")
puts "found one at #{url}"
result_file.puts "#{row_[0]},#{row_[1]}"
next
end # end if
end # end on_every_page
end # end crawl
end # end while
# we're done
puts "We're done."
end # end File.open
I applied the patch from here to my core.rb file in the anemone gem:
35 # Prevent page_queue from using excessive RAM. Can indirectly limit ra te of crawling. You'll additionally want to use discard_page_bodies and/or a non-memory 'storage' option
36 :max_page_queue_size => 100,
...
(The following used to be on line 155)
157 page_queue = SizedQueue.new(@opts[:max_page_queue_size])
and I have an hourly cron job doing:
#!/usr/bin/env python
import redis
r = redis.Redis()
r.flushall()
to try and keep redis' memory usage down. I'm restarting a giant crawl now, so we'll see how it goes!
I'll report back with results...
I'm doing something similar and I think that maybe you are just creating loads of data.
You are not saving the body so that should help memory requirements.
The only other improvement I can think of is to use Redis instead of Mongo as I found it was much more scalable for Anemone's storage.
Check the size of the data you have in mongo - I found I was saving a huge number of rows.
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