[IUG] Crummy webpac response caused by OCLC?

["Kyle Banerjee" <kyle dot banerjee at gmail dot com>]

Howdy all,

Recently, we have been experiencing intermittent problems with our
consortia webopac http://summit.orbiscascade.org/ responding very
slowly or not at all.

We've called the help desk a few times and had been told that runaway
processes of unknown cause were the problem.

Today, we're expecting a patch to be installed that will hopefully be
useful. More interestingly, III mentioned that our catalog was being
hit with several OCLC record number searches per second from the OCLC
IP range.

Just for the heck of it, I took a peek at the search stats and noticed
that in the current searches, there were a huge number of OCLC
searches. When I went to the search stats section, I'm seeing that
over half of all searches on our system are OCLC number searches -- an
impressive feat when you consider that our system serves 33
educational institutions with a combined total of around 200,000
students.

We have a robots.txt file that should work (but obviously isn't).
Anyway, I thought I'd give people a heads up. If your webopac has been
slow lately, you might see if OCLC is involved. BTW, does anyone know
why this might be happening? I would normally grouse about how it's
not nice to clobber databases with high speed automated searches
without regard for system impact, but I'd like to find out more before
jumping to conclusions

cranky kyle

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Kyle Banerjee
Digital Services Program Manager
Orbis Cascade Alliance
banerjek at uoregon dot edu / 541.359.9599