Sally, And don't forget the web crawlers. Google alone can swamp a site when the site's queries become hyperlinks as URL CGI calls on other people's websites. We were getting 90,000 robotic queries a day at one point before we blocked it. And Google is far from the only one.
Chuck
________________________________
From: Sally Hinchcliffe [mailto:S.Hinchcliffe@kew.org] Sent: Mon 6/19/2006 4:23 AM To: Roderic Page Cc: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: Re: [Tdwg-guid] Throttling searches [ Scanned for viruses ]
Hi Rod Sadly not everyone is polite, or asks, or leaves gaps between queries. We handle 10 - 15k searches a day which can peak to 20-30k when someone is actively crawling it, running against two servers, neither of which is in the first flush of youth. That's setting aside the irritation of having someone scrape and serve your data without acknowledgement (present company excepted, naturally) - data that we are assembling at some cost to the organisations which support ipni out of their core resources
I will obviously be providing a canned, limited download, but some people want everything. My current plan is to make the download only available on signing a data supply agreement, which will include terms on rates of further querying and use our logs to check for compliance
This may seem like a petty issue - yes we do want people to use and want our data - but on the other hand I have to make sure that the service is available to everyone, all the time. And I also have to make sure that the people who fund IPNI - the senior management at Kew, Harvard and Canberra - are happy that their efforts are not being abused.
Sally
I gotta ask -- what is so bad about making life easy for data scrapers (of which I'm one)? Isn't this rather the point -- we WANT to make it easy :-)
But, I do realise that providers may run into a problem of being overwhelmed by requests (though, wouldn't that be nice -- people actually want your data).
The NCBI throttles by asking people not to hammer the service, and some people leave around half a sec between requests to avoid being blocked. Connotea is thinking of "making the trigger be >10 requests within the last 15 seconds; requests arriving faster than that will be give a 503 response with a Retry-After header.", if that makes any sense.
You could also provide a service for data scrapers where they can get an RDF dump of the IPNI names, rather than have to scrape them.
Regards
Rod
On 19 Jun 2006, at 10:02, Sally Hinchcliffe wrote:
It's not an LSID issue per se, but LSIDs will make it harder to slow searches down. For instance, Google restricts use of its spell checker to 1000 a day by use of a key which is passed in with each request. Obviously this can't be done with LSIDs as then they wouldn't be the same for each user. The other reason why it's relevant to LSIDs is simply that providing a list of all relevant IPNI LSIDs (not necessary to the LSID implementation but a nice to have for caching / lookups for other systems using our LSIDs) also makes life easier for the datascrapers to operate
Also I thought ... here's a list full of clever people perhaps they will have some suggestions
Sally
Is this an LSID issue? LSIDs essential provide a binding service between an name and one or more web services (we default to HTTP GET bindings). It isn't really up to the LSID authority to administer any policies regarding the web service but simply to point at it. It is up to the web service to do things like throttling, authentication and authorization.
Imagine, for example, that the different services had different policies. It may be reasonable not to restrict the getMetadata() calls but to restrict the getData() calls.
The use of LSIDs does not create any new problems that weren't there with web page scraping - or scraping of any other web service.
Just my thoughts...
Roger
Ricardo Scachetti Pereira wrote:
Sally, You raised a really important issue that we had not reallyaddressed at the meeting. Thanks for that.
I would say that we should not constrain the resolution of LSIDsif we expect our LSID infrastructure to work. LSIDs will be the basis of our architecture so we better have good support for that.
However, that is sure a limiting factor. Also server efficiencywill likely vary quite a lot, depending on underlying system optimizations and all.
So I think that the solution for this problem is in caching LSIDresponses on the server LSID stack. Basically, after resolving an LSID once, your server should be able to resolve it again and again really quickly, until something on the metadata that is related to that id changes.
I haven't looked at this aspect of the LSID software stack, butmaybe others can say something about it. In any case I'll do some research on it and get back to you.
Again, thanks for bringing it up. Cheers,Ricardo
Sally Hinchcliffe wrote:
There are enough discontinuities in IPNI ids that 1,2,3 would quickly run into the sand. I agree it's not a new problem - I just hate to think I'm making life easier for the data scrapers Sally
It can be a problem but I'm not sure if there is a simple solution ... and how different is the LSID crawler scenario from an http://www.ipni.org/ipni/plantsearch?id= 1,2,3,4,5 ... 9999999 scenario?
Paul
-----Original Message----- From: tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu [mailto:tdwg-guid-bounces@mailman.nhm.ku.edu]On Behalf Of Sally Hinchcliffe Sent: 15 June 2006 12:08 To: tdwg-guid@mailman.nhm.ku.edu Subject: [Tdwg-guid] Throttling searches [ Scanned for viruses ]
Hi all another question that has come up here.
As discussed at the meeting, we're thinking of providing a complete download of all IPNI LSIDs plus a label (name and author, probably) which will be available as an annually produced download
Most people will play nice and just resolve one or two LSIDs as required, but by providing a complete list, we're making it very easy for someone to write a crawler that hits every LSID in turn and basically brings our server to its knees
Anybody know of a good way of enforcing more polite behaviour? We can make the download only available under a data supply agreement that includes a clause limiting hit rates, or we could limit by IP address (but this would ultimately block out services like Rod's simple resolver). I beleive Google's spell checker uses a key which has to be passed in as part of the query - obviously we can't do that with LSIDs
Any thoughts? Anyone think this is a problem?
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