[pmwiki-users] Pagelists Performance

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Fri, Dec 01, 2006 at 06:33:35PM +0000, Scott wrote:
> I've finally set up my PmWiki site and have 11909 wiki pages (each about 200-300
> kb in size, but will get bigger in the future). I'm using (:pagelist
> name=-*.HomePage count=10 fmt=#simplename:) for a pagelists section on my main
> homepage. The page takes anywhere from 15 to 25 seconds to load (as seen with
> the PageGeneration script). All other pages load very quickly as long as there
> are no pagelists.

The likely reason (:pagelist:) is taking so long is that PmWiki is
having to check read permissions on each page.  Have you tried setting

    $EnablePageListProtect = 0;

This tells PmWiki that it's okay to display the names of pages even
if they are protected by a read password.  As such, (:pagelist:)
can avoid having to check the permissions on each page.

Also, I find this particular query somewhat odd -- do you really
just want the first ten pages (count=10) out of the entire wiki, 
regardless of group name or any other attribute?  

> After doing some research I found the SearchIndex recipe/script. My main page
> with the pagelists didn't seem to benefit from the index file that was created.

That's correct -- since there aren't any search terms in the
pagelist command, indexing the page's contents won't really
help.  Beyond that, PmWiki's built-in indexing capabilities
supercedes anything that the SearchIndex recipe provides.

> So back to the searching again I found that I might want to do the
> PerGroupSubDirectories, but I would like some comments that would help me decide
> to make the switch to the sub directory structure.
> ...
> I don't want to abandon pagelists, but I'm concerned about the processing time.
> Will sub directories help with pagelists?

Simply switching to a per-group structure probably won't
help much in improving the speed of (:pagelist:), as
PmWiki will still need to scan all of the files to determine
which files to display.

> I remember reading somewhere that some college had 200,000 wiki pages and it was
> running fine.

Yes, however, they don't use (:pagelist:), or if they do, then it's
generally limited to a single wikigroup.

Pm