SID-01472: Multiple instances of rdiff running

Status:	Answered	TWiki version:		Perl version:
Category:		Server OS:		Last update:	13 years ago

Lately I have noticed on our web server that multiple instances of "rdiff" are being called by apache, sometimes as many as 10 at the same time, and they use up a lot of CPU resources. So what exactly does rdiff do? And do so many instances of it need to be running? Is it a critical service for TWiki to run properly, or could I just rename it to something else so that it won't constantly run? Any suggestions for dealing with this would be helpful.

-- ZhewarRostam - 2012-05-31

Discussion and Answer

The rdiff script shows the difference between topic versions, links accessible at the bottom of the page. If a page has hundreds of revisions it can take a long time to render all revisions. If you have bots crawling the site they can put a load on the server, especially if they follow the rdiff links. It is safe to kill those long running processes.

Fix: Modify the robots.txt file to exclude the rdiff script. Alternatively, put the rdiff script under authentication (as I did here on twiki.org).

-- PeterThoeny - 2012-05-31

Thanks a lot, I have noticed an unusual number of registration emails lately, I assumed they were bots. I will take your suggestions and hopefully the issue will go away.

-- ZhewarRostam - 2012-05-31

Closing question.

-- PeterThoeny - 2012-05-31

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