diff --git a/roles/mirrormanager/crawler/files/crawler.cron b/roles/mirrormanager/crawler/files/crawler.cron
index a3691d7732..2b68c76bc5 100644
--- a/roles/mirrormanager/crawler/files/crawler.cron
+++ b/roles/mirrormanager/crawler/files/crawler.cron
@@ -1,8 +1,7 @@
 # run the crawler twice a day
 # logs sent to /var/log/mirrormanager/crawler.log and crawl/* by default
-# 27 threads with 32GB of RAM seems to work so far
 #
 # [ "`hostname -s`" == "mm-crawler02" ] && sleep 2h is used to start the crawl
 # later on the second crawler to reduce the number of parallel accesses to
 # the database
-0 */12 * * * mirrormanager [ "`hostname -s`" == "mm-crawler02" ] && sleep 2h; /usr/bin/mm2_crawler --timeout-minutes 180 --threads 23 `/usr/local/bin/run_crawler.sh 2` > /dev/null 2>&1
+0 */12 * * * mirrormanager [ "`hostname -s`" == "mm-crawler02" ] && sleep 2h; /usr/bin/mm2_crawler --timeout-minutes 180 --threads 20 `/usr/local/bin/run_crawler.sh 2` > /dev/null 2>&1