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SpeedOptimizations

Questions answered by this recipe

• How do I make my wiki run faster?

Description

Tips for improving your wiki's performance.

PmWiki is quite fast for most setups and needs, however some customizations can slow performance:

• Anything that reads pages from disk slows the processing - e.g. Conditional Markup, Markup Expressions, or Custom Markup that calls the functions PageVar, ReadPage, RetrieveAuthPage, PageTextVar, CondAuth...
• PageLists can slow performance. For example, a menu/sidebar with a static bullet list is much faster than a menu populated dynamically by a pagelist -- and as a menu doesn't change often, it is usually better to update it by hand.
  • Adding a group=Main or a name=Main.*-Talk filter to a pagelist speeds it up.
  • A dynamic wiki trail from a pagelist is slower than a normal Wiki Trail, same as the menus.
• $EnablePageListProtect = 0; speeds significantly pagelists. Look at the docs though, before setting this: PagelistVariables
• Including other pages and PTVs from other pages require opening the disk files of the other pages -- so use sparingly.
• If you don't often change a site header/footer, it will be faster to have the content in the skin template instead of in wiki pages.
• Some recipes such as realtime visitor counters read and write to disk files on every page view -- that could be significantly slower.
• If a recipe manipulates session data, a session file is read/written. Reading a file takes time, writing to a file usually takes much more time.
• Using too many recipes requires opening all their cookbook *.php files, which adds some milli-seconds.
• Using Rewrite Rules/CleanUrls is slightly slower than not using it.
• $EnableIMSCaching = 1; makes everything faster, in the period between one edit and another edit (in the whole wiki) -- so if you have such long periods and many visitors between them, it may be useful.
• Loading javascripts, pictures and counters from external websites (for example Ads or Google Analytics) often makes a site "feel" slower.
• Loading external content - for example inline RSS feeds, Flickr/Twitter updates, Weather, Maps etc. -- is slower unless the recipe caches the remote data for a while and displays the cached version to many visitors.
• PmWiki on PHP 5 runs noticeably faster than on PHP 4.
• There are recipes (FastCache...) which speed the processing and the wiki should run faster for non-logged-in visitors.
• The SQLite PageStore recipe was reported to dramatically speed up a wiki including pagelists. It is very likely faster - but as of this writing (Feburary 2010) it's not yet tested on a wiki with hundreds of pages, hundreds of visitors a day and many editors, so consider it experimental.

If you run a dedicated hardware server and have some expertise (or can afford to hire an expert), you can do even more optimizations:

• Use a local hard disk rather than network storage.
• Use a faster filesystem such as Reiser4 or a less-CPU-intensive one such as JFS.
• Use fast SSD hard-disks -- even a Flash memory card with the program files could improve speeds (only use for limited, rarely modified files, not for wiki.d or uploads; needs testing - speed could also be worse).
• Use not Apache but a smaller/faster http server such as Nginx.
• Use PHP with FastCGI.
• Use a PHP cache such as APC. (See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHP_accelerator.)
• Copy all the program files, skins, css... into the RAM of the server and run the wiki from there.

Notes

See also

Contributors

This page was started after this post by Petko.

Comments

See discussion at SpeedOptimizations-Talk?