How do I tune link scans for shared hosting?

LinkGuard is deliberately gentle: it checks links in small batches, pauses between requests, stops each run after a short time budget, and skips runs entirely while your server's load average is high. On most hosting the defaults are right.

On very constrained shared hosting, two settings help. Batch size (Settings → Scanning) controls how many URLs are checked per 5-minute background run — drop it from 50 to 20 and a full scan simply spreads across more runs. Pause when server load exceeds sets the load-average threshold; the default (0) auto-detects your CPU count, but you can set it to 1 on a single-core box.

Everything runs through WP-Cron, so scans piggyback on normal traffic. If your host disables WP-Cron, point a real cron job at wp-cron.php every five minutes and LinkGuard works exactly the same.

Scans never run concurrently and each unique URL is checked once per cycle, no matter how many posts link to it.