Feedback on AutoNavigationPlugin

-- AndrewMoise - 15 Aug 2006

Thank you very much for sharing this Plugin with the TWikiCommunity. If you want you can use SVN to maintain your Plugin. ReadmeFirst has more.

Some feedback:

• I amde some changes to the Plugin topic, based on the latest template topic. Please feel free to take this into the next release
• How about measuring and documenting the PluginBenchmarks numbers?

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Aug 2006

Thanks for your changes; I appreciate it. The benchmark numbers are pretty ugly; the performance impact of this plugin is pretty severe. The cache helps, as you can see from the numbers, but this test is extremely kind to this plugin :-). On my small intranet site, the cache seems to make it pretty bearable, but for a publically available twiki I'd expect that it would be a big slowdown.

Here are the raw numbers from the benchmark:

With plugin enabled:

TWiki/GoodStyle 2.103 0.763 0.741 0.733 0.735

TWiki/FormattedSearch 1.564 0.833 0.837 0.834 0.837

TWiki/AutoNavigationPlugin 1.343 0.858 0.857 0.865 0.865

Without plugin enabled:

TWiki/GoodStyle 0.646 0.659 0.651 0.656 0.663

TWiki/FormattedSearch 0.735 0.768 0.745 0.748 0.751

TWiki/AutoNavigationPlugin 0.720 0.732 0.727 0.731 0.732

So the average load time, even in this heavily-cachable test, goes from .711 to .985 when I enable the plugin. I'll see if I can speed up the non-cached codepath, then :-).

For right now I'm happy maintaining the plugin locally in CVS; I may take you up on the offer of SVN once the development settles down a bit. Thanks.

-- AndrewMoise - 16 Aug 2006

Okay, I've done a round of speedups. Also, I missed something important on the PluginBenchmarks page; I had the plugin rendering a nav bar on every page, so instead of testing the case "plugin enabled but not doing anything," I was always testing the case "plugin enabled and doing something." Anyway, I have some new numbers:

• GoodStyle: .663/.681 = 97%
• TextFormattingRules: .775/.782 = 99%
• AutoNavigationPlugin: .763/.844 = 90%

Those numbers are a bit misleading, because this plugin is basically designed to be used on every page on a site, but there are still a few speedups I can do. There's also the matter of how the plugin performs when it needs to refresh its cache (once every few hours); that's a bit grimmer, but it happens rarely (and only when it's actually rendering the nav bar):

• AutoNavigationPlugin: .763/2.743 = 28%

:-/

-- AndrewMoise - 16 Aug 2006

That is already a big speed improvement. The benchmarks raise the awareness of writing speedy code.

I shifted the heading level in the plugin topic down by one level. This gives it consistent look & feel with other TWiki documentation. Please feel free to take this back into the next release.

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Aug 2006

Nice plugin! I was actually wondering how to have such a functionality in the left bar. Thanks!

However, there is one little problem: the regexp used to verify the username ($username) in line 214 of AutoNavigationPlugin.pm does not account for the possibility of usernames having the @ character. We are using Kerberos based authentication and in that case usernames have the @ sign. Just adding @ to the character class solved the problem for me.

-- DiegoSantaCruz - 22 Dec 2006

I don't know perl regex. Could you please give me an example that will use all of my webs topics that ure viewed and don't have a question mark. Also it would help if you documented all three examples you give here: AutoNavigationPlugin. (and reword the explanation of the first to be more explicit)

My URI: /twikiprod/bin/view/TWiki/AutoNavigationPlugin

-- BrianGupta - 15 Mar 2007

-- BrianGupta - 15 Mar 2007

Very useful plugin, thanks! One problem came up recently: The apache logfiles are no longer rotated as access_log.1 but as access_log-20080203 (at least in Fedora 8); the plugin doesn't read these access logs. A workaround is to have a cron script that makes symbolic links of the most recent logs to the old name convention. But it would be good to modify the plugin code.

-- StephanMatthiesen - 03 Feb 2008

We use cronolog to rotate log-files, this means that logfiles are stored in dated directories such as:

2008/07/22/access_log

Thus I need to be able to specify this in the LOGFILE variable.

As a quick hack I've added this to AutoNavigationPlugin.pm:

109 $LOGFILE = TWiki::Func::expandCommonVariables($LOGFILE, $topic, $web);

and configured the plugin as:

• • Set LOGFILE = /www/logs/%DATETIME{$year/$mo/$day}%/access_log

which uses the DATETIME plugin to generate today's date.

This kind of works, but obviously, only lists today's topics...

-- EllisPritchard - 22 Jul 2008

See and help out on open support question at ProblemsInstallingAutoNavPlugin.

-- PeterThoeny - 11 Nov 2008