To access the settings, click the 'Settings' menu option in the top left hand corner.

The first tab you will see is 'Connections', which controls how fast the tool will carry out certain tasks.

Maximum Concurrent Connections

This is the number of connections (or threads) the tool will run at any one time. By default, we set this as 'Automatically Optimised', with the option to turn this off and manually adjust your connections (not advised).

If you do switch this off, you will be able to adjust the connections up or down, within the maximum allowed by your license option (Solo has a max of 10, Pro and Agency have a max of 100).

Some things to note:

  • Increasing connections does not speed up any data extracted via API, the speeds of which are determined solely by thresholds and limits set by the data provider
  • Increasing connections will use up more CPU power and RAM, which your computer may not be able to handle
  • Some functions in URL Profiler are also intensive for the website server, for instance; link analysis, readability, email address harvesting. Turning the connections up may bring down the site you are profiling, or the server may block your connection.

The automatic optimisation of connections takes into account both the specification of your computer, and the actions you are attempting to carry out.

Connection Timeout

The second setting on this screen, ‘Connection Timeout’, allows you to tell the software how long to spend trying to download the page before moving on to the next URL.

If you are auditing links, for instance, you may well encounter some pages that have a lot of links/content on the page and take a while to download.

Set this at 40 seconds+ to give the tool a good chance of reporting these correctly.

Maximum Download Size

The maximum download size acts as a buffer to stop the tool from crashing when trying to download poorly formed html pages.

If you are auditing thousands of links you may have no prior knowledge of the quality of the pages. A page with thousands of keywords stuffed in the html could easily reach 4Mb, and if you try and profile lots of these you will use up a lot of RAM storing all this in your local memory.

As a rule, we recommned leaving the max download size at 1024Kb (or thereabouts) to avoid these sort of issues, but allow you to adjust if you wish.