[pmwiki-users] PmWiki scalebility questions (newbie)

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Thu Oct 19 07:52:14 CDT 2006


On Thu, Oct 19, 2006 at 02:16:00PM +0200, Tom Lederer wrote:
> i kinda re-open this thread. Having a relatively large wiki (wiki.d:  
> 33 MB in 5000 pages, Version 2.1.11 (Doh!)) running and facing some  
> performance issues lately, we think we discovered a problem with the  
> flock file. So i would like to know if we are correct and how to  
> improve.
> 
> From what we learned the situation seems to be like this:
> 
> Every page access process sets a read lock (with flock). Now if a  
> page should be changed, the writing process needs to wait for all old  
> reading processes to end, and does not allow any new reading  
> processes to set a lock.

While PmWiki once worked this way a very long time ago (April 2005,
prior to 2.0.0), it doesn't any longer.  Simply reading or 
accessing a page doesn't require a lock -- locks are set only 
when writing a page.

So, if a page should be changed, the writing process only needs to
wait for any other writing processes to end, and none of the
read processes are blocked.

(Of course, a recipe might be misusing the lock file and setting
a read lock on every page access, but the PmWiki core doesn't 
do this.)

> Is it possible that this results in page request times of several  
> seconds (1-30)?

Not likely.  There must be something else that is causing the delay.

> Can performance be improved by introducing per-group lock files?

Per-group lock files don't really help here -- whenever a page
is saved, we're actually writing pages across several groups
(e.g. Site.AllRecentChanges, .pageindex, .notifylist), and this
will only increase once we add some of the commenting and
blogging features.  

Pm




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