Generator is running slowly and becomes unresponsive...

[scott15]

Suddenly, my PHP Sitemap Generator started to run slowly and became unresponsive. It will only crawl a dozen or two pages before it becomes unresponsive. The generator takes 2-3 seconds to crawl each page. At first, I thought it might be something to do with the hosting plan (GoDaddy). I found the PHP version was outdated (7.4.33), so I updated it to 8.2.7. That didn't fix it. I reinstalled the latest version of the generator, but still no luck. I contacted GoDaddy support, but they said that nothing was wrong with the server. Any ideas on why, after over five years of running smoothly, my sitemap generator would stop functioning correctly?

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

Hello, 

in this case I would recommend to run generator in command line if you have ssh access to your server.

[scott15]

The website is running on a shared Windows host, so no SSH. I tried a web cron, but it 404'd.

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

The only solution would be to run it again resuming the process, or limit the number of indexed pages using "Maximum pages" setting.

[scott15]

I wanted to see if the Maximum pages setting would help, so I logged in to my generator, changed the max settings and then went to the Create Sitemap tab and it was blank (see attachment). Any ideas on what might have cause it and how to fix it?

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

Please try to increase "Memory limit" setting in generator configuration.

[scott15]

What would be the optimal memory setting?

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

It depends on the website size, you can try to double your current setting.

[scott15]

The site has around 1.5K of crawlable pages. I tried 256 and 0 for max memory but have seen no improvement.

[XML-Sitemaps Support]

Hello,

please let me know your generator URL/login in private message to check this.

[scott15]

I uninstalled/reinstalled the sitemap generator and configured it per the original documented setup. I then proceeded to change the PHP settings in the Plesk UI. The generator was initially using PHP ver. 7.2.34 went it stopped working on 7/3/23. It was brought to my attention by a GoDaddy tech that my site was using an outdated version of PHP. I then changed it to the latest version (8.2., and the generator still did not work correctly. I then uninstalled/reinstalled the sitemap generator again and configured it per the original documented setup. I then started to test the different PHP versions beginning with the most current (8.2., which didn't work. I then tried versions 8.1.21 and 8.0.29. When I used PHP version 7.4.33, the generator started to work correctly again.