[pmwiki-users] Faster searches and categories

Martin Fick fick at fgm.com
Mon Sep 12 12:49:45 CDT 2005


On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 12:35:45PM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 12:31:12PM -0400, Martin Fick wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 12, 2005 at 11:18:34AM -0500, Patrick R. Michaud wrote:
> > > Just for completeness: fast category and backlink indexes 
> > > are enabled by default in 2.0.5.  
> > 
> > I have not tried this yet so I am just guessing, but here
> > are some thoughts:  the indexes will speed up sebsequent
> > uses of the indexes, but it still seems like creating the
> > indexes may take an extreme amount of time at some point. 
> 
> The indexes are maintained incrementally, as pages are saved.
> 
> Creating the initial index of existing pages may take a little 
> bit of time, but even this can be made to occur "in passes"
> to avoid timeouts.  For example, the markup
> 
>     (:pagelist group=Main link=Main.HomePage:)
> 
> will update the index only for pages in Main (instead of having to
> scan the entire site).  And each time a portion of the index is 
> built it substantially reduces the overall time required to 
> build the remaining portions of the index (because those files
> no longer need to be scanned).  Eventually the index file
> converges to simply needing incremental updates for each page
> saved.

Some clever updating mechanisms indeed.  But these sound
only optimistic, they do not reduce the worst case scenario
at all, do they?


 
> > As you have mentioned in that past, it would probably be
> > best  to add a search mechanism directly to the pagestore. 
> > This could even be done with the current pagelist search
> > mechanism.
> 
> Well, I'm still not sure how to write this feature in a robust
> manner (i.e., that can retain compatibility across platforms
> and maintainability into the future).  It's possible to
> optimize for specific cases, but currently only at the expense 
> of breaking other ones.  And I'd like to get some feedback/
> performance results from the current backlinks indexing mechanism
> before committing to anything much more complex.


I will download the latest and test. :)

Does this mechanism work with apges which have not been
updated since before you added the link= feature (older
betas)?

-Martin




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