Can IronWebScraper handle multiple concurrent scraping tasks?

IronWebScraper is a C# library specifically designed to make web scraping simpler for .NET developers. It is capable of handling multiple concurrent scraping tasks efficiently.

In IronWebScraper, you can create a class that inherits from WebScraper and override the Init() method to set up your start URLs and the Parse() method to handle the data extraction. The library uses a multithreaded approach to handle concurrent requests, which allows you to scrape multiple URLs at the same time.

Here is an example of how you can set up a basic scraper with IronWebScraper to handle multiple concurrent tasks:

using IronWebScraper;

public class BlogScraper : WebScraper
{
    public override void Init()
    {
        this.LoggingLevel = WebScraper.LogLevel.All;
        // Add multiple URLs to start concurrently
        this.Request("http://example.com/blog/page/1", Parse);
        this.Request("http://example.com/blog/page/2", Parse);
        this.Request("http://example.com/blog/page/3", Parse);
        // ... You could add more pages or entirely different websites
    }

    public override void Parse(Response response)
    {
        // Parse the page data using response.Css to select elements
        foreach (var title in response.Css("h2.entry-title"))
        {
            string blogTitle = title.TextContentClean;
            // Do something with the extracted titles
        }

        // If there are more pages, you can queue them for scraping too
        if (response.CssExists("a.next"))
        {
            var nextPage = response.Css("a.next").First().Attributes["href"];
            this.Request(nextPage, Parse);
        }
    }
}

public class Program
{
    public static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        var scraper = new BlogScraper();
        scraper.Start(); // This will execute the scraping tasks concurrently
    }
}

In the example above, the Init() method queues up multiple page requests to be scraped concurrently. The Parse() method is responsible for processing the content of each page, and it can also queue additional pages if necessary (e.g., for pagination).

IronWebScraper manages the concurrency and threading behind the scenes. You can control the number of concurrent threads by setting the MaxThreads property. The library is designed to handle thread management, HTTP requests, and parsing tasks in a way that adheres to best practices, such as respecting robots.txt and handling user-agent strings.

If you would like to limit the concurrency (to respect server load, for example), you can set the MaxConcurrentRequests property, which controls how many HTTP requests you are making at a time.

Please keep in mind that web scraping can be a resource-intensive task, and it's important to scrape responsibly. Always check the website's robots.txt file and terms of service to ensure you're allowed to scrape it, and try to minimize the load on the website's server by limiting the number of concurrent requests and by scraping during off-peak hours if possible.