[pmwiki-users] PmWiki scalebility questions (newbie)

[Joachim Durchholz]

Hsing-Foo Wang schrieb:
> thanks for your input. Since I am a nOOb on the questions I asked,
> would it be possible for you to explain in more detail on your
> suggestion/tip please?

There isn't much else to explain. Just ask your administrator whether 
the file system can handle extremely large directories well.

You *could* test it yourself. Have somebody write a PHP program that 
creates empty files in a test directory, and measures the time for each 
run of, say, 100 files. If file creation slows down after creating 
10,000 files or so, you should split the wiki.d directory as described 
in another post; if the timings just fluctuate, you don't need to bother.

One data point:
A friend of mine is running a wiki with (currently) 4100 files in it. 
It's a relatively small and slow server (Intel Celeron 1.2GHz,
256MB RAM), with a dir_index option not set. Serving requests takes 
somewhere between 0.5 and 3 seconds (I don't have good instrumentation 
in place right now). He once had tons of files for deleted pages, and 
reported that he got a considerable speedup after deleting those files, 
so the slowdown was indeed observable.
In other words, it's barely tolerable at ~4000 files on a small server.

HTH
Jo