Hi @liviagouvea,
If you’ve enabled the Recommend Similar Articles plugin, that’s known to come with heavy indexing load; see:
https://github.com/pkp/pkp-lib/issues/9897
If you’re using that plugin, I’d recommend disabling it to see if that helps. Otherwise, reviewing your access logs to see what kind of bot behaviour you’re encountering is probably a good idea; you can use a mixture of robots.txt (for well-behaved bots) and IP-based blocking (for less well-behaved ones) to tune your exposure.
Thanks,
Alec Smecher
Public Knowledge Project Team