Hi Erich,

I have managed our self-hosted ezproxy instance at the Cleveland Public Library for about 2 years. In my experience, maintaining MaxVirtualHosts is something you need not worry much about.

When I first assumed management of our ezproxy, our unused virtual hosts lists (found at nameofyourezproxyinstance.edu/status) had not been purged since 2008(!) and to my knowledge, there never were any performance issues with it.

I have our MaxVirtualHosts set at 15,000 (this value is the denominator in 'Peak virtual hosts/limit' found at the status link posted above) and have never noticed any issues (although I don't recall ever seeing it above 2,000-3,000 since I first purged it) with it affecting server performance.

I only remove them manually every few months or so, if I remember to do so while I'm in the settings and tweaking other ezproxy settings.

In summary, I would set it to a high number and not worry about it; one less script to maintain. :)

Regards,
Will


Will Skora (he/him)
Web Administrator
Cleveland Public Library | Knowledge Office
325 Superior Ave. N.E. | Cleveland, OH 44114
P. 216-623-2914
https://cpl.org

------------------------------

Date:    Mon, 28 Nov 2022 20:50:44 +0000
From:    "Hammer, Erich F" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: best practice for EZProxy MaxVirtualHosts?

I'm relatively new to managing (self-hosted) EZProxy, and I have a question that I'm hoping someone here can help answer...

Every few days/weeks, I have to manually go into Host Maintenance and remove hosts that have not been used in over 30 days.  That is a PITA for something that otherwise is fairly pain-free.  The documentation explains how to set the MaxVirtualHosts value and that Proxy by Port (depreciated) has some limitations, but we have been using Proxy by HostName for a long time.  What the documentation doesn't touch on is twofold...

1. How does increasing the MaxVirtualHosts number to something really large effect performance?
2. Is there some way to automate the removal of stale hosts?

Our current MV is 4200.  What is appropriate for a sizeable ARL?

The latter is the more frustrating one.  I'm not opposed to writing a scheduled script to remove stale hosts to automate this, but I have yet to find any documentation on how to do this from a command/terminal line.

Thanks for any insight in advance.
Erich


--
Erich Hammer            Head of Library Systems
[log in to unmask]         University Libraries
518-442-3891              University @ Albany

Power corrupts; Absolute power corrupts absolutely;
God is all-powerful. Draw your own conclusions.

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End of CODE4LIB Digest - 24 Nov 2022 to 28 Nov 2022 (#2022-266)
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