TWiki performance (was: "Simply Amazing" and "Head Slappers")

[Ben Scott]

On 3/23/07, Drew Van Zandt <drew.vanzandt at gmail.com> wrote:
> I saw not-so-great TWiki performance on a decent box, even...

  liberty.gnhlug.org has two 1 GHz Pentium III CPUs, 1 GB main RAM,
and SCSI hard disks, and TWiki's performance still sucks mud through a
kinked straw.

  Sometimes, actions in TWiki just take forever, for no apparent
reasons.  I haven't done much investigation, but what I saw included
near-zero CPU load, no other running processes, and plenty of free
RAM.  The Perl interpreters running the TWiki calls are always just
Sleeping.

  I have a hypothesis that TWiki's anti-spam implementation
(BlackListPlugin) might be causing some of the grief.  TWiki is a set
of CGI scripts; there is no daemon or anything to do updates in the
background.  It follows that any spam counter-measures have to take
place in response to HTTP requests.  So if, for example, it takes a
long time to retrieve an update to a blacklist, TWiki's interactive
performance will suffer.

  Ultimately, I want to switch wiki.gnhlug.org from TWiki to MediaWiki
-- for a number of reasons, performance being just one of them.  Alas,
that requires tuits I don't have.

-- 
"One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / And the next it's rolling over me"
                                                  -- Rush, "Far Cry"