Academics who write crawlers that don't do much with the pages they fetch can do 100s of millions of pages in a day with an ordinary server and a big, fat network pipe. At that speed they aren't even parsing html, they're using regexes to try to find URLs and that's about it.
At blekko, we did ~ 100k pages/day/server with our production crawler, running on a cluster which was also doing anti-web-spam, inverting outgoing links into incoming links, indexing everything, and analytics batch jobs supporting development.
So unless you're doing a LOT of work on every webpage, you're kinda slow.
The easiest mistake to make is to not be asynch enough. This Python example is great.
Comments
Academics who write crawlers that don't do much with the pages they fetch can do 100s of millions of pages in a day with an ordinary server and a big, fat network pipe. At that speed they aren't even parsing html, they're using regexes to try to find URLs and that's about it.
At blekko, we did ~ 100k pages/day/server with our production crawler, running on a cluster which was also doing anti-web-spam, inverting outgoing links into incoming links, indexing everything, and analytics batch jobs supporting development.
So unless you're doing a LOT of work on every webpage, you're kinda slow.
The easiest mistake to make is to not be asynch enough. This Python example is great.