[pmwiki-users] setting up some blogs

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Fri Feb 10 07:40:38 CST 2006


On Fri, Feb 10, 2006 at 12:23:12PM +0100, pcoud at free.fr wrote:
> 
> I'm afraid that categories as they are today in pmwiki are unusable for a site
> with numerous pages, especially a blog (lots of small pages). I did a quick
> benchmark using the [[!Category]] style mark up on a wiki with 5,000 dummy
> pages (a few lines each), with only one page belonging to a category.
> Displaying this category (which contains only one of the 5,000 pages) 
> takes 18s :
> ...
> On an on-line site with several users, the same scenario would like 
> hit into php timeout, or at least user frustration :-/

While I don't dispute at all that categories and searches could use 
some improvement, I suspect there's something not quite right with
your setup and/or the way you're producing the timings.

In particular, pmwiki.org has over 3,400 pages on it and doesn't
have any trouble dealing with categories. 
See any of 

    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Category/UpdateMe,
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Category/Skins
    http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Category/Images
    etc.

and you can see that they all render at about the same speed
as normal pages.  Of course, pmwiki.org is being run on a hosting
service (not a dedicated server), and I'm actually running about
eight separate wikis on that service.

> I know there is a .linkindex file
> which is supposed to speed up (:pagelist:), but is it used for 
>    command such as: (:pagelist '!{$Name}' list=normal:)
> or only for command of type (:pagelist link=... :) ?

The .linkindex file is used Only for commands of type 
(:pagelist link= ...:), which is the "correct" way to display 
categories.  Using (:pagelist '!{$Name}':) performs a full text 
search of all of the pages, and would explain why your tests were
taking so long.  (Using '!{$Name}' will also finds pages that 
aren't in the category.)

> IMHO, for a strictly file based wiki, the way to go would be the "categories
> knows their pages" as discussed
> here:
> 
> http://tavi.sourceforge.net/TaviCategories

Part of PmWiki's blogging support will be the ability for a page
to add itself to a trail.  Once we have this, it's an easy matter
for pages with category tags to simply add themselves to category
trails, which is pretty much what you're describing here.

Pm





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