How to improve the crawling efficiency

For many crawlers, it is very important to improve the crawling efficiency of crawlers when facing a large number of data acquisition tasks. In the scenario of large-scale data acquisition, the adoption of efficient methods can significantly reduce the time spent by crawlers and improve the efficiency of data acquisition. Here are some effective methods to help you optimize your crawler and improve your crawling efficiency:

1. Minimize the number of website visits

The process of waiting for a response to a network request takes a lot of time, so it is important to minimize the number of visits to the target website. When optimizing the crawler process, we can start from multiple aspects, streamline the process, avoid repeated access to the same information, and implement de-processing to reduce the number of website visits, thereby saving time and resources.

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First of all, in the design of crawlers, the process should be streamlined as much as possible to avoid obtaining the same information repeatedly on multiple pages. For the data to be collected, we should optimize the acquisition path, try to directly visit the page where the target data is located, and avoid obtaining data through multiple intermediate pages. This can reduce the number of network requests and page jumps, improve the crawling efficiency.

Secondly, the implementation of reprocessing is a very important measure. In the work of crawlers, many cases will encounter duplicate urls or data. By discriminating against unique identifiers such as urls or ids, we can easily tell if the data has already been crawled. If it has already been crawled, the data can be skipped to avoid repeated access and obtaining the same data, saving time and resources.

①What are the methods to improve the efficiency of crawling

In addition, we can also use caching technology to reduce the number of visits to the target website. After the crawler visits a page and retrieves data, it can cache that data. When you need to access the same page again, first check whether the data already exists in the cache, and if it does, use the cached data directly instead of re-requesting the page. This can avoid repeated network requests and improve the efficiency of data acquisition.

2. Distributed crawlers

Even if the crawling process is optimized, there is still a limit to the unit time of single machine crawling, especially in the case of large-scale page queues. Consider using distributed crawlers to take full advantage of the computing power of multiple machines. For tasks that are independent of each other and do not have communication, the tasks can be manually divided and then executed on multiple machines, reducing the workload of each machine, thus significantly reducing the collection time. For example, there are 2 million web pages to climb, you can use 5 machines to climb each of the 400,000 pages that do not repeat each other, compared to a single collection, the time will be shortened by 5 times.

②Why is it more efficient for crawlers to use proxies

For tasks with communication requirements, such as a changing queue to be climbed, manually splitting the tasks will result in cross-repeated crawling. At this time, only distributed crawlers can be used, through a Master storage queue, and other slaves to get their own, so that they can share the queue and avoid repeated crawling.

3. Set the climb rate reasonably

In order to avoid excessive access pressure on the target website, the crawler should reasonably set the crawl rate, that is, the number of requests launched per second. Too high a crawl rate can cause the website server to respond slowly or even block the IP. A reasonable crawl rate can reduce the risk of being identified by a website as a malicious crawler, while also ensuring the quality and integrity of the data.

4. Use multithreading and asynchronous requests

Using multi-thread technology can accelerate the crawl speed, send multiple requests in parallel, and improve the efficiency of data acquisition. In addition, using asynchronous requests is an effective way to continue sending other requests while waiting for a response to one request, thereby making the most of the waiting time and improving overall efficiency.

5. Use the cache and proxy IP pools

Using caching can reduce the number of visits to the target website by avoiding repeated requests for the same data. The proxy IP pool can help to rotate different IP addresses when repeatedly visiting the same website, increase the anonymity and stability of the crawler, and reduce the probability of being blocked.

To sum up, improving the crawling efficiency of crawlers is a comprehensive optimization process. By means of process optimization, distributed crawling, reasonable setting of crawl rate, multi-threading and asynchronous requests, the use of cache and proxy IP pool, the collection efficiency of crawling can be significantly improved, so that data acquisition is more efficient, stable and reliable.