Performance issue on DSpace 8 – slow response

[zaoui nadia]

Hello DSpace community,

I am currently experiencing a performance issue on my DSpace 8 institutional repository (running on Debian 12 with Apache2 as a reverse proxy in front of Tomcat).

The system becomes intermittently slow, and the graphical user interface takes a long time to respond, which impacts users.

Has anyone experienced similar performance degradation in DSpace 8 under load?

I would appreciate any recommendations

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hello,

First, I would recommend going through the Performance Tuning Guidelines to ensure you are following all the baseline guidance there.  Specifically if you're experiencing slow loading on the frontend, you might want to look into the section "Limit which pages are processed via Server Side Rendering (SSR)".  

Also, you could try upgrading to the latest version of DSpace 8 (8.4), to make sure you have the latest performance improvements and fixes for that version at least. 

Second, there have been a lot of performance problems reported recently due to aggressive bots, so you may want to look into your site activity to see if that looks like the issue.  There are a few resources linked on the Performance Tuning doc under Blocking Aggressive Bots;  COAR's Dealing with Bots resource also offers some good information. You can also try this ticket discussion that gathers various methods users have tried: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/4565. 

Hope that gives you a place to start,

-Lia