By quankiquanki
Do you guys know why curl (or any other request) works very slowly on some pages of Craigslist.org? The issue can be reproduced by doing this:
- Choose a $5 droplet with Ubuntu 14.04 x64 (I have also tried $10 and $20).
- Choose New York 1, 2 or 3 (I have also tried SF and Amsterdam).
- Use an SSH key (have not tried it without a key)
- ssh into the created droplet as root user
- curl https://www.craigslist.org/about/sites
Then you will see that it is very slowly loading in the HTML page. Other websites work just fine at an almost instant speed. Does anyone know why this happens with craigslist specifically? I have tried servers from other providers and they work just fine.
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They must be throttling Digital Ocean. My home server running Ubuntu Server can curl just fine.
While I cannot say for certain, I would not be at all surprised if craigslist intentionally slowed responses when they see a CURL user-agent string. Craigslist’s terms of use do not allow scraping of their content and that would be the primary reason for a curl request. Based on your attempts from multiple regions (on different networks) this is almost certainly in the way that CL is handling requests. Over the years craigslist has seen an absolute ton of various projects, companies and individuals scraping their content for whatever reasons.
In general, my advice would be to use craigslist in a standard browser according to their TOS.
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