Resolved How to disable Plesk Screenshot Service?

[Wolfgang Reidlinger]

Hi there!

Can anyone tell me how to disable the Plesk Screenshot Service?
Plesk Screenshot Service
It takes current screenshots of the websites hosted via Plesk and displays it in the backend beside the settings area.

This service cause long delays in the loading time of the Plesk backend!

 

[IgorG]

Try to remove or replace url here:

 

[Wolfgang Reidlinger]

This did not do any changes.



The variables in the fetched URL are the same as before!

https://shots.plesk.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fexample.com%2F&product=Plesk%2F18.0.38&type=jpeg&width=1600&height=1200&scale=1&delay=0&cache=3600&sign=8487b7f25cba6ee189bf93dc2670def3f08804ed6d89dcf782afc1d751202c74

I also restarted the Plesk Service.

service sw-engine restart && service sw-cp-server restart

 

[LTUser]

Open your panel.ini Editor...

Add:
[screenshotService]
url = ""

save...
then...
service sw-engine restart && service sw-cp-server restart

 

[Wolfgang Reidlinger]

thanks, question answered!

it's also possible to do the changes via terminal in this file.

/opt/psa/admin/conf/panel.ini

service sw-engine restart && service sw-cp-server restart

 

[Anthony]

@Wolfgang Reidlinger

This service cause long delays in the loading time of the Plesk backend!

Hello,

Could you please clarify how this affected your Plesk installations?
These are asynchronous requests to the external service that not affects nor backend nor Plesk Panel.

 

[LTUser]

These are asynchronous requests to the external service

I am not asked, but I have something to say about it.
Many security-minded admins do not like it when functions are implemented and activated in the ACP without being asked, which access functions outside the server or handle authorizations carelessly in the standard system.

I don't want to accuse Plesk of malicious intent, but from my point of view this approach is a bit reckless.

 

[Wolfgang Reidlinger]

@Wolfgang Reidlinger

Hello,

Could you please clarify how this affected your Plesk installations?
These are asynchronous requests to the external service that not affects nor backend nor Plesk Panel.

@Anthony it does not affect my Plesk installation. But nevertheless it's annoying and strange, that every time you open up the settings for a specific domain you see the loading wheel. My plesk backend loads in less than a second, the screenshots service takes up to file seconds.
I don't need the screenshot preview of the website, if I want the check the website I have to visit it anyways.

 

[thinkjarvis]

Also experiencing issues with screenshot bot. It seems to disrupt my WP ALL IMPORT processes. I have followed these steps to prevent it crawling my websites for this reason.

 

[nmdpa3]

We stopped this service long ago via panel.ini, because when the screenshot bot crawls the site it spins up PHP-FPM's and those take CPU. This service would continuously bang up against 100's of sites, causing CPU usage on the server to be unnecessarily high. It also happens from the WP Toolkit overview pages, and that, to my knowledge was never addressed even though we brought it up numerous times. Also, the BOT's run from a datacenter in Ireland, and it looks like sites are being crawled for exposures. Overall, we think that feature is one that was not well thought out when added to Plesk.

 

[Peter Debik]

An increase PHP-FPM usage can only be 1 single request against the homepage just as any other user or search engine bot would do them. The screenshot service only loads the website's homepage one single time. If this transaction is causing a strong impact on cpu usage, the website build should be reviewed, because opening the homepage of a website once should not have any noticeable impact. Even when this happens a hundred times across all domains on a server (which won't happen at the same moment, but distributed over a longer period), it should not have any negative impact. The behavior of the screenshot service is less intrusive than the behavior of any search engine bot out there, not to mention all the bad bots that are really hitting servers hard.

 

[nmdpa3]

An increase PHP-FPM usage can only be 1 single request against the homepage just as any other user or search engine bot would do them. The screenshot service only loads the website's homepage one single time. If this transaction is causing a strong impact on cpu usage, the website build should be reviewed, because opening the homepage of a website once should not have any noticeable impact. Even when this happens a hundred times across all domains on a server (which won't happen at the same moment, but distributed over a longer period), it should not have any negative impact. The behavior of the screenshot service is less intrusive than the behavior of any search engine bot out there, not to mention all the bad bots that are really hitting servers hard.

Totally understand what you are saying. We run a ton of WP sites, and our experience showed the bot was causing PHP-FPM's to load because it was browsing the WP site which uses PHP. We actually opened a ticket back then and I believe that may have resulted in options to turn it off via panel.ini.