hi,

I've recently built a web robot which is supposed to spider through an internet forum. This site has no robots.txt file. I estimate that the robot will send about one request per second. Offhand that wouldn't seem to be too much of a bother for that website (it has about 1,000 people online at any given time so the increased traffic wouldn't be substantial) but just to make sure I want to know if I'd be violating any etiquette issues.

I also thought of doing the spidering using parallel downloading of the pages. How would I go about doing this? Multi-threading? If I do implement this then for a short time the traffic will increase substantially. Could this be construed as an attack on the server?


p.s. I realize I could clear up some of this by contacting the website administrator but, at this point, for various reasons, I still don't want to do so, although I may in the future.


In reply to spidering, multi-threading and netiquette by dannoura

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