DSpace is too slow

[zaoui nadia]

Hello everyone,

I have installed DSpace 8 on Debian 12 with Tomcat 10. 

My DSpace instance is accessible via HTTPS. It worked fine for a while, but now when users add items or do a search .... it freezes and becomes very slow. 

Sometimes it returns a 503 error, and after refreshing the page, it works again.
I ran the top command — here is what it shows me:  

[mw...@iu.edu]

On Thu, Nov 13, 2025 at 09:48:43AM +0000, 'zaoui nadia' via DSpace Technical Support wrote:
> I have installed DSpace 8 on Debian 12 with Tomcat 10.
> My DSpace instance is accessible via HTTPS. It worked fine for a while, but now when users add items or do a search .... it freezes and becomes very slow.
> Sometimes it returns a 503 error, and after refreshing the page, it works again.

It is likely that some greedy AI training bots have found your
repository and are slurping out your content as quickly as they can,
leaving almost no bandwidth for legitimate users. We all see this.
How to cope with it is an ongoing discussion.

I wish that there was some way to hold these people accountable for
unleashing virulent parasites that threaten the health of the
community. So far we haven't found one.

--
Mark H. Wood
Lead Technology Analyst

University Library
Indiana University Indianapolis
755 W. Michigan Street
Indianapolis, IN 46202
317-274-0749
library.indianapolis.iu.edu

[DSpace Technical Support]

Hi,

I'd also recommend looking more closely at your logs to ensure there are no severe errors that are slowing your site down.  See our Troubleshooting Guide: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSPACE/Troubleshoot+an+error

Additionally, you should verify that you are following our guidelines for best performance: https://wiki.lyrasis.org/display/DSDOC8x/Performance+Tuning+DSpace

Especially take a look at potentially limiting which pages are processed by Server Side Rendering (or make sure you are updated to the latest version of 8.x, currently 8.2).  By limiting the pages that are processed by Server Side Rendering, that *may* help to alleviate some of those "greedy bots" that Mark mentions.

If you find in your logs (especially your apache logs) that there are some bots that are slowing down your site, we have a ticket where we are starting to gather information about how various sites are blocking or slowing down those greedy bots: https://github.com/DSpace/dspace-angular/issues/4565   You might find some of the hints/tips there useful if this is the problem you are encountering.

Tim