[pmwiki-users] Speedy search?

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Tue Feb 21 11:15:21 CST 2006


On Tue, Feb 21, 2006 at 05:07:51PM +0100, pcoud at free.fr wrote:
> Patrick R. Michaud wrote :
> IMHO, a cache is a strong requirement for pmwiki, given its rich markup which
> raise a high load on page generation.
> 
> I'm aware of the coherency difficulties : a cache system for pmwiki 
> would not be trivial due to the dynamic aspect (page includes etc.),
> but with some assistance by the page author (author-provided hints) 
> it should be manageable [...]

Unfortunately, I think that many (most) authors would totally 
misunderstand or get it wrong about when caching is safe or
not safe.

> Also, may be an alternative caching approach which would work with visitor
> dependant content would be not to cache on a per-page basis, but on a finer
> unit: on calls to MarkupToHTML for example. 

It almost has to be this way; almost every skin (including the PmWiki
default) has at least some elements that depend somehow on the identity
or authorizations of the current visitor.  Caching the entire page
defeats that.

Here's my current off-the-top-of-my-head list of things that would
indicate that some component of a page cannot be reliably cached:

  - read access restrictions on the page, or read access restrictions
    of any included components of the page
  - markup that is based on visitor permissions or identity
        (:if auth ...:)
        (:if authid ...:)
  - markup that acts differently depending on form or url parameters
        (:pagelist:)
  - any markups that are time sensitive
        (:if date ...:)
  - miscellaneous
        (:if attachments:)

Pm




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