Scrapy Link Extractor Rules - scrapy

Question

I have a spider setup using link extractor rules. The spider crawls and scrapes the items that I expect, although it will only follow the 'Next' pagination button to the 3rd page, where the spider then finishes without any errors, there are a total of 50 pages to crawl via the 'Next' pagination. Here is my code:
from scrapy.linkextractors import LinkExtractor
from scrapy.spiders import Rule, CrawlSpider
class MySpider(CrawlSpider):
name = 'my_spider'
start_urls = [some_base_url]
rules = (
Rule(LinkExtractor(allow='//div[#data-test="productGridContainer"]//a[contains(#data-test, "product-title")]'), callback='parse_item'),
Rule(LinkExtractor(restrict_xpaths='//div[#data-test="productGridContainer"]//a[contains(#data-test, "next")]'), follow=True)
)
def parse_item(self, response):
# inspect_response(response, self)
...items are being scraped
return scraped_info
It feels like I may be missing a setting or something as the code functions as expected for the first 3 iterations. My settings file does not override the DEPTH_LIMIT default of 0. Any help is greatly appreciated, thank you.
EDIT 1
It appears it may not have anything to do with my code as if I start with a different product page I can get up to 8 pages scraped before the spider exits. Not sure if its the site I am crawling or how to troubleshoot?
EDIT 2
Troubleshooting it some more it appears that my 'Next' link disappears from the web page. When I start on the first page the pagination element is present to go to the next page. When I view the response for the next page there are no products and no next link element so the spider thinks it it done. I have tried enabling cookies to see if the site is requiring a cookie in order to paginate. That doesnt have any affect. Could it be a timing thing?
EDIT 3
I have adjusted the download delay and concurrent request values to see if that makes a difference. I get the same results whether I pull the page of data in 1 second or 30 minutes. I am assuming 30 minutes is slow enough as I can manually do it faster than that.
EDIT 4
Tried to enable cookies along with the cookie middleware in debug mode to see if that would make a difference. The cookies are fetched and sent with the requests but I get the same behavior when trying to navigate pages.

Answer 1

To check if the site denies too many requests in short time you can add the following code to your spider (e.g. before your rulesstatement) and play around with the value. See also the excellent documentation.
custom_settings = {
'DOWNLOAD_DELAY': 0.4
}