1. CommonCrawl
Building an open Web-Scale crawl using Hadoop.
Ahad Rana
Architect / Engineer at CommonCrawl
ahad@commoncrawl.org

2. Who is CommonCrawl ?
• A 501(c)3 non-profit “dedicated to building, maintaining and
making widely available a comprehensive crawl of the
Internet for the purpose of enabling a new wave of
innovation, education and research.”
• Funded through a grant by Gil Elbaz, former Googler and
founder of Applied Semantics, and current CEO of Factual Inc.
• Board members include Carl Malamud and Nova Spivack.

3. Motivations Behind CommonCrawl
• Internet is a massively disruptive force.
• Exponential advances in computing capacity, storage and
bandwidth are creating constant flux and disequilibrium in the IT
domain.
• Cloud computing makes large scale, on-demand computing
affordable for even the smallest startup.
• Hadoop provides the technology stack that enables us to crunch
massive amounts of data.
• Having the ability to “Map-Reduce the Internet” opens up lots of
new opportunities for disruptive innovation and we would like to
reduce the cost of doing this by an order of magnitude, at least.
• White list only the major search engines trend by Webmasters puts
the future of the Open Web at risk and stifles future search
innovation and evolution.

4. Our Strategy
• Crawl broadly and frequently across all TLDs.
• Prioritize the crawl based on simplified criteria (rank and
freshness).
• Upload the crawl corpus to S3.
• Make our S3 bucket widely accessible to as many users as
possible.
• Build support libraries to facilitate access to the S3 data via
Hadoop.
• Focus on doing a few things really well.
• Listen to customers and open up more metadata and services
as needed.
• We are not a comprehensive crawl, and may never be 

5. Some Numbers
• URLs in Crawl DB – 14 billion
• URLs with inverse link graph – 1.6 billion
• URLS with content in S3 – 2.5 billion
• Recent crawled documents – 500 million
• Uploaded documents after Deduping 300 million.
• Newly discovered URLs – 1.9 billion
• # of Vertices in Page Rank (recent caclulation) – 3.5 billion
• # of Edges in Page Rank Graph (recent caclulation) – 17 billion

6. Current System Design
• Batch oriented crawl list generation.
• High volume crawling via independent crawlers.
• Crawlers dump data into HDFS.
• Map-Reduce jobs parse, extract metadata from crawled
documents in bulk independently of crawlers.
• Periodically, we ‘checkpoint’ the crawl, which involves, among
other things:
– Post processing of crawled documents (deduping etc.)
– ARC file generation
– Link graph updates
– Crawl database updates.
– Crawl list regeneration.

7. Our Cluster Config
• Modest internal cluster consisting of 24 Hadoop nodes,4
crawler nodes, and 2 NameNode / Database servers.
• Each Hadoop node has 6 x 1.5 TB drives and Dual-QuadCore
Xeons with 24 or 32 GB of RAM.
• 9 Map Tasks per node, avg 4 Reducers per node, BLOCK
compression using LZO.

8. Crawler Design Overview

9. Crawler Design Details
• Java codebase.
• Asynchronous IO model using custom NIO based HTTP stack.
• Lots of worker threads that synchronize with main thread via
Asynchronous message queues.
• Can sustain a crawl rate of ~250 URLS per second.
• Up to 500 active HTTP connections at any one time.
• Currently, no document parsing in crawler process.
• We currently run 8 crawlers and crawl on average ~100 million
URLs per day, when crawling.
• During post processing phase, on average we process 800
million documents.
• After Deduping, we package and upload on average
approximately 500 million documents to S3.

10. Crawl Database
• Primary Keys are 128 bit URL fingerprints, consisting of 64 bit
domain fingerprint, and 64 bit URL fingerprint (Rabin-Hash).
• Keys are distributed via modulo operation of URL portion of
fingerprint only.
• Currently, we run 4 reducers per node, and there is one node
down, so we have 92 unique shards.
• Keys in each shard are sorted by Domain FP, then URL FP.
• We like the 64 bit domain id, since it is a generated key, but it
is wasteful.
• We may move to a 32 bit root domain id / 32 bit domain id +
64 URL fingerprint key scheme in the future, and then sort by
root domain, domain, and then FP per shard.

11. Crawl Database – Continued
• Values in the Crawl Database consist of extensible Metadata
structures.
• We currently use our own DDL and compiler for generating
structures (vs. using Thrift/ProtoBuffers/Avro).
• Avro / ProtoBufs were not available when we started, and we
added lots of Hadoop friendly stuff to our version (multipart [key]
attributes lead to auto WritableComparable derived classes, with
built-in Raw Comparator support etc.).
• Our compiler also generates RPC stubs, with Google ProtoBuf style
message passing semantics (Message w/ optional Struct In, optional
Struct Out) instead of Thrift style semantics (Method with multiple
arguments and a return type).
• We prefer the former because it is better attuned to our preference
towards the asynchronous style of RPC programming.

12. Map-Reduce Pipeline – Parse/Dedupe/Arc Generation
Phase 1
Phase 2

13. Map-Reduce Pipeline – Link Graph Construction
Link Graph Construction
Inverse Link Graph Construction

14. Map-Reduce Pipeline – PageRank Edge Graph Construction

15. Page Rank Process
Distribution Phase
Calculation Phase
Generate Page Rank Values

16. The Need For a Smarter Merge
• Pipelining nature of HDFS means each Reducer writes it’s
output to local disk first, then to Repl Level – 1 other nodes.
• If intermediate data record sets are already sorted, the need
to run an Identity Mapper/Shuffle/Merge Sort phase to join to
sorted record sets is very expensive.

17. Our Solution: