[Netarchivesuite-users] Timelimit – usage and NAS problems

[Peter Svanberg]

Two things about timelimits.

1) When and how do you use timelimits in harvesting? It’s another way to limit the jobs. I suppose that stops mainly slow host – that maybe has figures for politeness in robots.txt, if you allow that to influence. Or host with many small objects, each delaying.

2) NAS has limitations in handling jobs stopped by timelimit. It checks for mentions of ”timelimit” on the last line in some Heritrix report and then reports timelimit for all domains which has not allready been stopped by data or object limits. Hence the statistics gets wrong. In our current broad crawl (pass 3) just 11 % of the domains were not ready when the jobs where timelimit stopped. Also, if there is another pass, all those falsely timelimit-reported domains is unnecessarily harvetested again.

This can be corrected in two ways:

A) NAS could look in the hosts-report files ”remaining” column to check which domains are stopped or not.

B) We could suggest/fix Heritrix to add a line in the log with a new Heritrix code when the queue for a domain gets empty. And then easily use that in NAS, as with objects and data limit codes.

I appreciate answers and comments.

Peter Svanberg
Sweden