I setup Nutch with a db.fetch.interval.default of 60000 so that I can crawl every day. If I don't, it won't even look at my site when I crawl the next day. But when I do crawl the next day, every page that it fetched yesterday gets fetched with a 200 response code, indicating that it's not using the previous day's date in the "If-Modified-Since". Shouldn't it skip fetching pages that haven't changed? Is there a way to make it do that? I noticed a ProtocolStatus.NOT_MODIFIED in Fetcher.java, so I think it should be able to do this, shouldn't it?
By the way, this is cut and pasted from conf/nutch-default.xml from the current trunk:
<!-- web db properties -->
<property>
<name>db.default.fetch.interval</name>
<value>30</value>
<description>(DEPRECATED) The default number of days between re-fetches of a page.
</description>
</property>
<property>
<name>db.fetch.interval.default</name>
<value>2592000</value>
<description>The default number of seconds between re-fetches of a page (30 days).
</description>
</property>
I found the problem. It's a bug in Nutch. I've emailed the Nutch developer list about it, but here's my fix:
Index: src/plugin/protocol-http/src/java/org/apache/nutch/protocol/http/HttpResponse.java
===================================================================
--- src/plugin/protocol-http/src/java/org/apache/nutch/protocol/http/HttpResponse.java (revision 802632)
+++ src/plugin/protocol-http/src/java/org/apache/nutch/protocol/http/HttpResponse.java (working copy)
@@ -124,11 +124,15 @@
reqStr.append("\r\n");
}
- reqStr.append("\r\n");
if (datum.getModifiedTime() > 0) {
reqStr.append("If-Modified-Since: " + HttpDateFormat.toString(datum.getModifiedTime()));
reqStr.append("\r\n");
}
+ else if (datum.getFetchTime() > 0) {
+ reqStr.append("If-Modified-Since: " + HttpDateFormat.toString(datum.getFetchTime()));
+ reqStr.append("\r\n");
+ }
+ reqStr.append("\r\n");
byte[] reqBytes= reqStr.toString().getBytes();
Now I'm seeing 304s in my Apache logs where I'm supposed to be seeing them.
I think you are mistaken with an option name - db.fetch.interval.default. It should be.
db.default.fetch.interval
The number of days after each page injected is fetched that it should next be fetched. 30 by default.
I just read change log of the latest version, and found following
- NUTCH-61 - Support for adaptive re-fetch interval and detection of
unmodified content. (ab)
If you don't have latest version installed, I suggest you to do that.
Also, are you using -adddays option for crawling?