Glossary

Bytes, KB and statistics

Heritrix adheres to the following conventions for displaying byte and bit amounts:

Legend Type  
B Bytes  
KB Kilobytes 1 KB = 1024 B
MB Megabytes 1 MB = 1024 KB
GB Gigabytes 1 GB = 1024 MB
b bits  
Kb Kilobits 1 Kb = 1000 b
Mb Megabits 1 Mb = 1000 Kb
Gb Gigabits 1 Gb = 1000 Mb
Checkpointing

Heritrix checkpointing is heavily influenced by Mercator checkpointing. In one of the papers on Mercator, checkpointing is described this way: “Checkpointing is an important part of any long-running process such as a web crawl. By checkpointing we mean writing a representation of the crawler’s state to stable storage that, in the event of a failure, is sufficient to allow the crawler to recover its state by reading the checkpoint and to resume crawling from the exact state it was in at the time of the checkpoint. By this definition, in the event of a failure, any work performed after the most recent checkpoint is lost, but none of the work up to the most recent checkpoint. In Mercator, the frequency with which the background thread performs a checkpoint is user-configurable; we typically checkpoint anywhere from 1 to 4 times per day.”

See Checkpointing for a discussion of the Heritrix implementation.

CrawlURI
A URI and its associated data such as the parent URI and number of links.
Dates and Times
All times in Heritrix are GMT, assuming the clock and timezone on the local system are correct. This means that all dates/times in logs are GMT, all dates and times shown in the WUI are GMT, and any times or dates entered by the user must be in GMT.
Discovered URIs

A discovered URI is any URI that has been confirmed to be within “scope.” This includes URIs that have been processed, are being processed, and have finished processing. It does not include URIs that have been “forgotten.” Forgotten URIs are URIs deemed out of scope during fetch. This is most likely due to the operator changing the scope definition.

Note: Since the same URI can be fetched multiple times (at least in most Frontiers), the number of discovered URIs may be somewhat lower then the combined queued, in process, and finished items. This is due to duplicate URIs being queued and processed. The variance is likely to be especially high in Frontiers implementing “revisit” strategies.

Discovery Path

Each URI has a discovery path. The path contains one character for each link or embed followed from the seed, for example “LLLE” might be an image on a page that’s 3 links away from a seed.

The character legend is as follows:

  • R - Redirect
  • E - Embedded links necessary to render the page (such as <img src=...>)
  • X - Speculative embed (aggressive JavaScript link extraction)
  • L - Link (normal navigation links like <a href=...>)
  • P - Prerequisite (such as DNS lookup or robots.txt)
  • I - Inferred/implied links. Not necessarily in the source material, but deduced by convention (such as /favicon.ico)
  • M - Manifest (such as links discovered from a sitemap file)
  • S - Synthesized form-submit

The discovery path of a seed is an empty string.

The discovery path can be used to configure scope of a crawl using the HopsPathMatchesRegexDecideRule. It also appears in the crawl logs and in the WARC metadata records as the hopsFromSeed field.

Frontier
A Frontier is a pluggable module in Heritrix that maintains the internal state of the crawl. See Frontier.
Host

A host can serve multiple domains or a domain can be served by multiple hosts. For our purposes, a host is the same as the hostname in a URI. DNS is not considered because it is volatile and may be unavailable. For example, if multiple URIs point to the same ip address, they are considered three different logical hosts (at the same level of the URI/HTTP protocol).

Conforming HTTP proxies behave similarly. They would not consider a URI and a IP address interchangeable.

This is not ideal for politeness because it applies politeness rules to the physical host rather than the logical host.

Crawl Job
In order to run a crawl, a configuration must be created. In Heritrix such a configuration is called a crawl job. A crawl job is based on the Spring framework. The job uses Spring beans as configuration objects that define the crawl.
Link Hop Count
This is the number of links followed from the seed to reach a URI. Seeds have a link hop count of zero. Link hop count is equal to the count of L's in a URIs discovery path.
Pending URIs
This is the number of URIs that are waiting for detailed processing. It is also the number of discovered URIs that have not been inspected for scope or duplicates. Depending on the implementation of the Frontier this might always be zero. It may also be an adjusted number that accounts for duplicates.
Profile

A profile is a template for a crawl job. It contains all the configurations in a crawl job, but it is not considered “crawlable.” Heritrix will not allow you to directly crawl a profile. Only jobs based on profiles can be crawled.

A common example of a profile configuration is leaving the metadata.operatorContactUrl property undefined to force the operator to input a valid value. This applies to the default profile that comes with Heritrix. Other examples would be to leave the seed list empty or not specify a mandatory processor.

Profiles can be used as templates by leaving their configuration settings in an invalid state. In this way, an operator is forced to choose his or her settings when creating a job from a profile. This can be advantageous when an administrator must configure many different crawl jobs to accommodate his or her crawling policy.

Politeness
Politeness refers to attempts by the crawler software to limit the load on a site it is crawling. Without politeness restrictions the crawler might overwhelm smaller sites and even cause moderately sized sites to slow down significantly. Unless you have express permission to crawl a site aggressively, you should apply strict politeness rules to any crawl.
Queue States
State Meaning
ready Queues ready to emit a URL now.
in-process Queues that have emitted a URL that is currently being processed.
snoozed Due to the crawl delay, or waiting before retries.
active Total in-process + ready + snoozed
inactive Queues currently not being considered (due to queue rotation).
ineligible Inactive queues where the queue precedence exceeds the precedence floor.
retired Disabled for some reason, e.g. that queue has hit it’s allocated quota.
exhausted Queues that are now empty.
Queued URIs
The number of URIs queued and waiting for processing. Queued URIs include any URIs that failed to be fetched but will be retried.
Regular Expressions

All regular expressions in Heritrix are Java regular expressions.

Java regular expressions differ from those used in other programming languages, like Perl. For detailed information on Java regular expressions see the Java API description of the java.util.regex.Pattern class.

SHA1
The Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA) used by Heritrix to encrypt files.
Server
A server is a service on a host. There may be more than one service on a host. Different services are usually differentiated by port number.
Spring
Spring is a Java application framework used by Heritrix. Crawl jobs are based on Spring components, known as “beans.” In order to view the Spring beans of a crawl configuration, use the Browse Beans functionality.
SURT

SURT stands for Sort-friendly URI Reordering Transform. It is a transformation applied to URIs that makes their left-to-right representation better match the natural hierarchy of domain names.

A URI scheme://domain.tld/path?query has a SURT form of scheme://(tld,domain,)/path?query.

Conversion to SURT form also involves making all characters lowercase and changing the https scheme to http. Further, the “/” character after a URI authority component will only appear in SURT form if it appears in plain URI form. An example of a URI authority component is the third slash in a regular HTTP URI. This convention proves important when using real URIs as a shorthand for SURT prefixes.

SURT form URIs are typically not used to specify exact URIs for fetching. Rather, SURT form is useful when comparing or sorting URIs. URIs in SURT format sort into natural groups. For example, all “archive.org” URIs will be adjacent, regardless of subdomains such as “books.archive.org” or “movies.archive.org.”

Most importantly, a SURT form URI, or a truncated version of a SURT form URI can be used as a SURT prefix. A SURT prefix will often correspond to all URIs within a common area of interest. For example, the prefix http://(is, will be shared by all URIs in the .is top-level domain.

SURT Prefix

A URI in SURT form, especially if truncated, may be of use as a “SURT prefix,” a shared prefix string of all SURT form URIs in the same area of interest. For example, the prefix http://(is., will be shared by all SURT form URIs in the .is top-level domain. The prefix http://(org,archive.www,)/movies will be shared by all URIs at www.archive.org with a path beginning with /movies. http://(org,archive.www,)/movies is also a valid full SURT form URI.

A collection of sorted SURT prefixes is an efficient way to specify a desired crawl scope. For example, any URI whose SURT form starts with any of the prefixes should be included.

A small set of conventions can be used to calculate an “implied SURT prefix” from a regular URI, such as a URI supplied as a crawl seed. These conventions are:

  1. Convert the URI to its SURT form.
  2. If there are at least three slashes (“/”) in the SURT form, remove everything after the last slash. For example, http://(org,example,www,)/main/subsection/ is unchanged. http://(org,example,www,)/main/subsection is truncated to http://(org,example,www,)/main/. http://(org.example,www,)/ is unchanged and http://(org,example,www) is unchanged.
  3. If the resulting form ends in an off-parenthesis (“)”), remove the off-parenthesis. Each of the above examples except the last one is unchanged. The last one http://(org,example,www,) becomes http://(org,example,www,.

This allows many seed URIs, in their usual form, to imply the most useful SURT prefixes for crawling related URIs. The presence or absence of a trailing “/” on URIs without further path-info is a subtle indicator as to whether subdomains of the supplied domain should be included.

For example, seed http://www.archive.org/ will become SURT form and supplied SURT prefix http://(org,archive,www,)/, and is the prefix of all SURT form URIs on www.archive.org. However, any subdomain URI like http://homepages.www.archive.org/directory would be ruled out because its SURT form http://(org,archive,www,homepages,)/directory does not begin with the full SURT prefix, including the “)” deduced from the seed.

Toe Threads
When crawling, Heritrix employs a configurable number of Toe Threads to process URIs. Each of these threads will request a URI from the Frontier, apply the set of Processors to it, and finally report it as completed to the Frontier.

Status codes

Each crawled URI gets a status code. This code (or number) indicates the result of a URI fetch in Heritrix.

Codes ranging from 200 to 599 are standard HTTP response codes and information about their meanings is available at the World Wide Web consortium’s Web page.

Other Heritrix status codes are listed below.

1 Successful DNS lookup
0 Fetch never tried (perhaps protocol unsupported or illegal URI)
-1 DNS lookup failed
-2 HTTP connect failed
-3 HTTP connect broken
-4 HTTP timeout
-5 Unexpected runtime exception. See runtime-errors.log.
-6 Prerequisite domain-lookup failed, precluding fetch attempt. (the main pre-requisite is WHOIS lookup. If you see this it’s likely the domain doesn’t exist anymore)
-7 URI recognized as unsupported or illegal.
-8 Multiple retries failed, retry limit reached.
-50 Temporary status assigned to URIs awaiting preconditions. Appearance in logs may be a bug.
-60 URIs assigned a failure status. They could not be queued by the Frontier and may be unfetchable.
-61 Prerequisite robots.txt fetch failed, precluding a fetch attempt.
-62 Some other prerequisite failed, precluding a fetch attempt.
-63 A prerequisite (of any type) could not be scheduled, precluding a fetch attempt.
-404 Empty HTTP response interpreted as a 404.
-3000 Severe Java Error condition occured such as OutOfMemoryError or StackOverflowError during URI processing.
-4000 “Chaff” detection of traps/content with negligible value applied.
-4001 The URI is too many link hops away from the seed.
-4002 The URI is too many embed/transitive hops away from the last URI in scope.
-5000 The URI is out of scope upon reexamination. This only happens if the scope changes during the crawl.
-5001 Blocked from fetch by user setting.
-5002 Blocked by a custom processor, which could include the hash mapper (for multi-node crawling) if enabled.
-5003 Blocked due to exceeding an established quota.
-5004 Blocked due to exceeding an established runtime
-6000 Deleted from Frontier by user.
-7000 Processing thread was killed by the operator. This could happen if a thread is an a non-responsive condition.
-9998 Robots.txt rules precluded fetch.