our free XML sitemap generator keeps getting stuck on website crawling phase, any ideas why?

Hello Ji-woo Suzuki,

the main problem we're seeing is that it gets stubbornly stuck during the website crawling phase, especially on larger sites.

This behavior, particularly without explicit errors and after a certain number of URLs (500-600), typically points to resource exhaustion or a timeout issue rather than a fundamental flaw in the crawling logic itself, assuming it works fine on smaller sites. When your free XML sitemap generator hits a wall like that, consider a few potential culprits. First, check the server environment where your generator is running. For larger sites, a crawl can be resource-intensive. Look into your PHP memory limit (`memory_limit`), maximum execution time (`max_execution_time`), and possibly even the `post_max_size` and `upload_max_filesize` if the sitemap generation process involves handling large data sets internally. If these limits are too low, the process will silently terminate or hang once it exceeds them. Beyond server resources, also consider the target website's behavior. Is the site heavily reliant on JavaScript rendering, which many basic sitemap generators struggle with? Are there excessive internal redirects, canonical tags pointing to themselves, or deep pagination structures creating potential crawl traps that exhaust your generator's allocated resources or time? Sometimes, the target server might also be rate-limiting or temporarily blocking your crawler's IP after a certain number of requests, leading to a hang. For very large websites or those with complex structures, you might find more robust solutions in cloud-based XML sitemap generators or dedicated desktop tools that are designed to handle millions of URLs and manage resource allocation more effectively, helping to avoid these common website crawling issues. Hope this helps your conversions!