Question

Dear TWiki community,

We are exploring the possibility of using TWiki to make a structured wiki application. But we need to know how scalable is TWiki. I searched for information on this and I got this.

TwikiScalabilityStability

But the above document is very old(2003) which states that Twiki has no support for clustering. Still the same holds true?

We are looking at making an application which may need to serve very large content to very large user base(like wikipedia). Is Twiki the best bet for it?(we can probably use mediawiki . But it's not a structured wiki) .

Any help is much appreciated.

Environment

-- RajendraPrasad - 31 Mar 2007

Answer

If you answer a question - or someone answered one of your questions - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status selector is below the edit box.

If you have the possibility of sponsoring some open source development, http://WikiRing.com are slowly working on a Database backed store. If not, MichaelDaum (also in the WikIRing partnership ) is working on adding strong Caching infrastructure to the FreetownRelease, with some serious success.

At the same time, I am working towards loosening up some of the user systems in TWiki to make clustering that more simple - like adding OpenID user authentication, registration and serving.

So in short, yes, there are some scalability options, some are in limited release, and others are coming along soon.

-- SvenDowideit - 31 Mar 2007

As you noticed, MediaWiki scales well for what it is built, but it lacks many features needed at the enterprise, such as flexible namespaces, fine grained access control, per page attachments, tagging, etc. It is also a plain wiki, meaning, you'd need to ask programmers to create wiki applications instead of delegating this to your users.

Actually, the current TWiki can scale quite well when used behind firewall. I know of many corporate TWiki deployments that have over 100,000 pages and many thousand or tens of thousands users each. Some of those installations have load-balanced webservers talking to a storage backend over NFS. TWiki.org has been hosted on SourceForge in the past, they have a similar configuration.

As the founder of TWiki I feel that it is in the best interest of the TWikiCommunity if the discussion, spec and implementation of the database backend and other new features happen on twiki.org, and not behind closed doors. And, yes, sponsoring consultants to do the work is a good thing.

-- PeterThoeny - 31 Mar 2007

I read the release notes for FreetownRelease and didn't see anything related with performance, caching and scalability (despite what I read on FreetownRelease). Was this implemented or not?

-- GuilhermeGarnier - 22 Jan 2008

See supplemental document on TWiki.TWikiScalability.

-- PeterThoeny - 26 Mar 2008