Question

I need some advise on balancing number of Topics versus creating multiple Webs within a TWiki Intranet.

Environment

Not all that relevant.... running on a PogoLinux box, using ModPerl...

Situation

We are beginning to roll TWiki out as our Intranet platform. So far it's been great. Some teams, however, are worried about the scaleability of having all people share the "Main" web...where we have about 930 topics. They are asking for a departmental Web. It seems like overkill to create 20 Webs just so that people can have their own 'name space'.

I read about the 7500 grep limit on ArgumentListTooLong. I also saw this topic where Peter was asked to provide some stats on large TWiki installations:

CopingWithThousandsOfUsers:

Peter and others - could you post more details of the scale of large installations, including number of users, number of topics, Kbytes total of topics, and typical number of views and changes per month?

* [ PeterThoeny ] I will post those numbers, stay tuned.

... but I never saw any stats.

Any advise would be appreciated....

• How many Topics in a Web are too many?
• How many Webs are too many?

Thanks in advance.

-- MichaelGorrell - 22 Jan 2004

Answer

Number of topics in a web: Speed depends on the file system used. For the regular ext2 Unix file system you will see a degrade in performance if you have more than around 10K files in a directory. That is, around 5000 topics if you keep the RCS files in the same directory (they can be placed in an RCS subdirectory, see installation notes). You can use a file system like the ReiserFS that can handle large numbers of files in a directory.

The ArgumentListIsTooLongForSearch issue has been resolved, get the latest TWikiBetaRelease.

Number of topics vs. number of webs: This is a question of balance. It is better to have a few webs with many topics per web then the other way around. This is because cross-linking within the same web (aka namespace) is easier, and search is easier. The question is if content is related or not. So, for most companies it probably makes sense to separate the Sales content from the Engineering content; on the other hand, the Tech Pubs content could go under the Engineering content. This depends on the size of the company. At my work place (see TWikiSuccessStoryOfWindRiver) we have a process to establish new webs (depends on certain criterias we set). We have now some large webs several thousands of topics but also a few smaller webs.

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Jan 2004

See also HowManyTopicsAndWebsCanTWikiSupport

-- PeterThoeny - 29 Apr 2007