On Mon, 3 May 1999, Lex Spoon wrote:

> 
> > >I am curious how, in practice, a Swiki performs.  In particular, how
> > >practical are these things for communities of several hundred people?
> > 
> 
> The current Swikis haven't been optimized much at all, but as Mark
> Guzdial posted earlier, they are handling his ~100 student sophomore
> class without trouble. 

I've used swiki's for 25-40 person classes for, gosh, over a year. It does
ok. I have my own swikifying routine which avoids some of the speed hit
Lex pointed out.

> I can quantify this a little more.  We did some quick tests on a Mac
> (Bolot, Je77, do you know what kind of Mac it is?), and found two things
> that are bottlenecks right now: 
> 
> 	1. Reading a Swiki's source text, ie SwikiPage>>text, takes over
> 100 milliseconds by itself.  This could obviously be improved:
> contentsOfEntireFile on the samy file took like 15-20 milliseconds. 

I'm going to change that tomorrow! Whoa. This must absolutely *kill* on
searchs. And it certainly explains the interminable restore times.

> 	2. "swikifying" a page is currently dominated by the check for
> whether a particular line break is in between < and >.  This check is
> needed, but it could be made more efficient.  With the check, the time
> taken is about 200 milliseconds.  Without the check, the time is down in
> the 10-20 millisecond range, if I remember right.  It was definately a
> LOT less. 

Wow. I didn't realize the check was *that* painful. And here I thought it
was my clever parser that made mine so much quicker. <wince/> Good to know
though.

However, there seems to be other places where Swiki's can be a tad
problematic: If someone else is accessing a page and PWS is processing
(like doing a search) I get a "server unavailable". This is with Squeak
2.1. If this has been fixed (via threading?) in later versions I'd be
happy except for the weird slowdowns I experience :(

One thing I think would nice is if the text and the "metadata" of a
Swikipage were stored in separate files. Right now, you only save things
like name, edit time, etc. when you edit the page. Thus, if your server
crashes you lose all metadata since the last edit or image save.

On the other hand, I'm eager to see some sort of PWS connection to
MinneStore. Now *that* will be interesting.

Cheers,
Bijan