NAME

Gungho::Manual::FAQ - Gungho FAQ

Q. "Why Did You Call It Gungho"?

It rhymes with Xango, which is its predecessor.

Q. "I don't understand the notation of the config"

To make the notation concise, we use a notation like engine.module = POE. Each level is a key in the hash, so the previous example translates to a config like

  my $config = {
    engine => {
      module => "POE"
    }
  }

Or, in YAML:

  engine:
    module: POE

Q. "My requests are being served slow. What can I do?"

There are actually a number of things that may affect fetch speed.

Is Gungho The Right Crawler For Your Data Set?

Gungho uses an asynchronous engine, and with POE::Component::Client::Keepalive it reuses the connections to the same host.

This kind of setup works great if you are accessing a lot of diffferent hosts, but could easily jam up if you are accessing, for example, a single host. For such datasets, Gungho will be no more effective than a simple script repeated calls to LWP::UserAgent->get().

Choosing The Right loop_delay With Gungho::Engine::POE

"engine.config.loop_delay" specifies the number of seconds to wait between each "loop" iteration.

A single loop in Gungho is basically (1) check if we have requests in the provider, and (2) attempt to fetch that request.

Therefore, if you set this loop_delay to something too low, then you would be spending most of the time attempting to fetch a request from the provider instead of spending it fetching the request.

On the other hand if you set this too high, you will have to wait until Gungho notices that there are pending requests.

There's no general "right" value for this configuration parameter, because it largely depends on what kind of dataset you're working with. As a general rule of thumb, set it to something sane like 5 seconds, and check out your logs to see if that value is an acceptable value.

Workaround For Jamming Up PoCo::Client::HTTP

When using Gungho::Engine::POE, POE::Component::Client::HTTP is used internally to do the actual fetching. Its performance is usually great, but when you reach a certain number of requests, it start to jam up and all of the sudden your requests will be served very slowly.

This limitation is per-session limit, so Gungho tries to workaround this problem by spawning multiple sessions of POE::Component::Client::HTTP.

If you believe this is the cause of the problem, try setting the engine.config.spawn to a higher value (the default is 2)

Do note, however, that excessive enqueueing of requests is going to e a problem regardless. You should at least keep a mental note of how many requests you're sending to the POE queue, and throttle as necessary.

Considerations When Using A Proxy With Gungho::Engine::POE

Proxies are great, and could be used in crawler applications, but by default it doesn't play nicely with Gungho's POE engine.

The short version of the remedy is: Set engine.config.keepalive.keep_alive to 0

  engine:
    module: POE
    config:
      keepalive:
        keep_alive: 0

Now the long explanation. Gungho::Engine::POE, and POE::Component::Client::HTTP which is used internally, uses a module called POE::Component::Client::Keepalive to manage the connections, and to possibly reuse the already established connection. However, when using a proxy, all the requests go through the given proxy, so PoCo::Client::Keepalive will try to reuse the connections to all of the requests.

This is obviously aproblem, because it will make the entire request set to go through the same connection -- and therefore you lose all parallelism.

To workaround this problem, you need to disable PoCo::Component::Keepalive, and hence the above configuration.