[pmwiki-users] Wiki speed diferences, no apparent reason

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Mar 21, 2006 at 06:47:34PM -0700, Philip Stitt wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> Sometimes my website is unbearably slow. It will get that way for about
> 20 to 30 minutes at a time. If I spend all day working on my site, I'll
> see this happen maybe 5 or 6 times during the day, sometimes more. When
> it gets slow like that, it seems slower than being on dial-up. But then
> other times it's quite fast, even when generating long pagelists. 

It almost has to be system related somehow.  It's not as if the
code PmWiki uses varies in any appreciable way, so if PmWiki is ever 
fast at generating a long pagelist, then any observed slowdowns must 
be due to something else (or an interaction with something else).

And yes, I think we've all noticed that pmwiki.org behaves the
same way sometimes -- there are periods where it's really fast,
and other times that it seems to crawl.

> I know
> it's not the server I'm on being overloaded, or my ISP - I have other
> non-wiki pages that will load very quickly during these slow periods. 

That's actually not a reliable indicator of server overload.  On one
of my previous webhosting providers, they actually used different 
servers for static versus dynamic pages.  Also, static pages will
often get held in a server's disk cache, so they get served quickly
even if the the overall server is bogged down (often due to disk
contention).

> My specific problem aside, I was thinking about a page on PmWiki.org
> devoted to the issue of speed performance with PmWiki, since it's so
> important to webmasters, and I couldn't find a page on the topic. 

Sounds great to me.  As Jo suggested (later message), perhaps a 
PITS entry is good enough, although we can really put it anywhere 
for now.

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