[pmwiki-users] Slashdotting?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Sun, May 13, 2007 at 09:13:26PM -0400, Stirling Westrup wrote:
> Oh, and the advice about avoiding pagelists is good. The bit about dynamically
> created pages is confusing though. Aren't all PmWiki pages dynamically created?

By default, all pages in PmWiki are dynamically created, yes.

PmWiki has several (somewhat experimental) caching features, 
which may be able to help out some.  You can set up page caching
by setting:

  $PageCacheDir = 'work.d';
  $EnableHTMLCache = 1;

This caches the main contents of each page, so that PmWiki doesn't
have to reconvert the markup to HTML on each page request.  However,
it can't/won't cache pages that contain any of:
  - {$Author}, {$AuthId}
  - (:if authid:)
  - (:if auth:)
  - (:noleft:), (:noright:), (:notitle:), (:noheader:), (:nofooter:)
  - (:title:), (:keywords:), (:description:)
  - $[phrase]
  - date values such as 'today', 'now', 'yesterday', etc.

Using the above in sidebar pages, or in Site.PageActions or the like
is okay, as the $EnableHTMLCache feature caches only the main contents.

I tried using the HTML cache on pmwiki.org in early 2006, and ended up
turning it off because it didn't seem to provide much improvement.
But that may be because pmwiki.org is frequently updated, and because
(at least at the time) disk latency -- especially on writes -- was the
primary bottleneck for pmwiki.org .  

Still, if you expect to have thousands of hits to a common set of pages,
enabling the HTML cache might be the way to go.  It's probably worthwhile
to get some more reports about efficiency as well.  :-)

Pm