[Koha] [Extern] - Koha Slow Sometimes

[Mona Panchaud]

Hello Michael,

Thank you! That helped us a lot.
We were now able to identify that yes, we get a lot (!) of traffic from Bots. However, it seems like these all respect the robots.txt according to their documentation and we didn't yet have such a file.
So I deployed a robots.txt file (using the reccomendations in the koha doc and an open source bot list as well as checking the user agents that we had in our logs file) and I hope that already helps.
Otherwise we still have the Cloudflare option.

Kind regards,
Mona
On 26 Jul 2025 at 12:02 +0200, Michael Kuhn <mik at adminkuhn.ch>, wrote:
> Hi Mona
>
> Sorry for not answering through the list. You wrote:
>
> > > Okay thanks for the links. That could be... The timeframe when it got
> > > slow also matches up with when we started having problems.
> > > What makes me a bit hesitant to say it is really this is that in the
> > > CPU monitoring it never is fully used..
> > > What exactly should I look for in this log file to verify whether it
> > > is really this problem?
>
> I suggest you look for the bots that identify like
>
> grep '[Bb]ot\|[Cc]rawler]' plack.log
>
> which will maybe let you find lines containing names of bots like
> AdsBot-Google, ahrefs, AliyunSecBot, Amazonbot, applebot,
> archive.org_bot, AwarioBot etc. etc.
>
> Besides there may be many more lines by bots that don't identify and
> which are not identifiable by the above approach. For example it is very
> suspicious if you see several searches per second all from different Ip
> addresses. For such cases I'd suggest to use Anubis oder Cloudflare (as
> you already do).
>
> > > We are already using Cloudflare so changing the settings there could
> > > be helpful.
>
> I don't know about Cloudflare since on the hosts I manage I was able to
> solve the problem using Apache directives (RewriteCond
> %{HTTP_USER_AGENT}) blocking at least the bots which identify.On my own
> demo installation I was able to install Anubis.
>
> Best wishes: Michael
> --
> Geschäftsführer · Diplombibliothekar BBS, Informatiker eidg. Fachausweis
> Admin Kuhn GmbH · Pappelstrasse 20 · 4123 Allschwil · Schweiz
> T 0041 (0)61 261 55 61 · E mik at adminkuhn.ch · W www.adminkuhn.ch
>
>
>
> Am 25.07.25 um 21:10 schrieb Mona Panchaud:
> > Hello Michael,
> >
> > We are currently running into the problem again that it is very slow, also on the newer version.
> >
> > In the server information page on the koha admin panel I see the following information:
> > "Memcached:    Servers: 127.0.0.1:11211 | Namespace: koha_bibliothek | Status: running. | Config read from: koha-conf.xml"
> > So I assume Memcached is working correctly? Is there something else that I would need to check to see whether it is working correctly?
> >
> > Are there any other options for making it faster?
> >
> > Thanks in advance!
> >
> > Kind regards,
> > Mona
> > On 25 Jul 2025 at 10:40 +0200, Stolarski, Michael <michael.stolarski at dkfz-heidelberg.de>, wrote:
> >
> > > > Hello Mona,
> > > >
> > > > have you checked if the Memcached feature is enabled?
> > > > This feature can improve the performance of Koha.
> > > >
> > > > Best Regards
> > > > Michael
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Michael Stolarski
> > > > AG Desktop-Services / IT-Service
> > > > IT Core Facility (W310) / Bibliothek (W510)
> > > >
> > > > Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum
> > > > Stiftung des öffentlichen Rechts
> > > > Im Neuenheimer Feld 280
> > > > 69120 Heidelberg
> > > > Tel: +49 6221 42 3658
> > > > Tel: +49 6221 42 2376 (Servicezentrum)
> > > >
> > > > michael.stolarski at dkfz-heidelberg.de
> > > > www.dkfz.de
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > Vorstand: Prof. Dr. med. Dr. h. c. Michael Baumann, Ursula Weyrich
> > > > USt-ID: DE143293537
> > > >
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> > > > Von: Koha <koha-bounces at lists.katipo.co.nz> Im Auftrag von Mona Panchaud
> > > > Gesendet: Donnerstag, 24. Juli 2025 20:14
> > > > An: koha at lists.katipo.co.nz
> > > > Betreff: [Extern] - [Koha] Koha Slow Sometimes
> > > >
> > > > Hello,
> > > >
> > > > We have recently observed that our Koha installation is sometimes extremely slow and we ran into timeouts from Cloudflare. In the logs we were not able to see anything suspicious.
> > > > Our server is also not fully maxed out in CPU/RAM.
> > > >
> > > > We have this week upgraded from 24.05 to 24.11 and hope that it will be better.
> > > > Are there any other steps we can take to improve the performance?
> > > >
> > > > All the best,
> > > > Mona
> > > > _______________________________________________
> > > >
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> > > >
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>