Resolved Many requests from Plesk Screenshot Bot

[DavidDV]

Server operating system version

Debian 10.13

Plesk version and microupdate number

18.0.51

Hi,

I have many servers with Plesk and I'm noticing that lately I have CPU spikes caused by the Plesk bot Screenshot, makes hundreds of requests to the pages hosted on the server randomly.

I attach an example screenshot of a website.

Anyone else with the same problem?

 

[Peter Debik]

Hi @DavidDV, now that is an interesting question. To stop the unnecessary crawling I suggest to add this to your panel.ini file:

[screenshotService]
url = ''

It should stop it immediately.

I was not able to find out anything about the potential cause why the bot crawls the whole website. I'll go ask here if someone knows more about it.

 

[Peter Debik]

Already got an answer, and it is actually quite obvious. I should have thought of that: When you open your website, the page needs 110+ resources to render. This includes .css files, .js files, images, fonts. Before a screenshot can be taken, all these need to be loaded. This is the same process when a user visits your page for the first time. For that reason you see all the requests from the Screenshot Service against so many resources.

How to address this? You can either just turn the service off, but your load spikes are probably not caused by it, because it loads the page just as other users. It is more likely that either bad bots are also hitting the page or that the number of files that need to be loaded is too high. Maybe you can find a way to reduce the load that the page itself has. I checked the website against Pingdom Pingdom Tools and also got a rather low performance grade there. The total size of the homepage requires 9.2 MB downloads and 122 requests. This puts a lot of load on the cpu for regular users.