Question

Hi,

could creating a larger number of webs (e.g. 10-15) lead to any negative consequence for instance problems with performance?

What about the users who are registered? Does is make any difference if the number of users is 100 or 1000? If so, what if the users do not register and instead use the ldap authentification?

What about the authorisation concept? Will lead setting up more groups and restricted webs lead to performance problems?

Thanks Alex

Environment

-- AlexRaabe - 14 Aug 2006

Answer

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In theory yes, because compared to an indexed database type wiki, the file system store of wiki requires the operating system to do a OPENDIR/READDERI/NEXTDIR step and repeat. But the reality is that most modern file systems are fast.

If you have top level webs then the directory being searched is small.

If you are using subwebs then the directory being searched is already full of .txt and .txt,v files. Once again, the search time will depend on the size of the directory, how far it goes into indiect blocks. There is also a slight code overhead for subwebs.

I emphasise that this is RELATIVE to database based wikis (or, when Crawford gets there, a database based TWiki) where the list of web names is an indexed table.

I emphasise further more that it is a matter of the FILESYSTEM performance in the presence of either few or many other files. Tuning your file system is the issue - if any - here.

Poeple have reported use with many tens of top level webs with no degradation of performance. There are ways of ameliorating any loss of performance of subwebs by altering the way RCS files are handled - basically put them in a subdirectory.

All this is documented, either in Codev or in your OS documentation.

Replacing the way users are handled with a database system would improve performacne there too

-- AntonAylward - 15 Aug 2006

I do not think there will be any measurable performance impact if you have a few 100 webs. I know of one major installation that has 500 webs.

On number of topics in the Main web (or any other web), performance depends on the number of files in the web. Some people say that the EXT2 file system is getting slow if you have tens of thousands of files in a directory. Other file systems such as the Reiser file system are faster with many files in a directory. TWiki does some processing in users and groups, but as long as you are below 10K users you should not see a noticable performance impact.

Since you are an order of magnitude below these numbers you should be OK.

-- PeterThoeny - 16 Aug 2006

The company I work for currently has approx. 850 webs. They've changed "search all public", turned off the ability to update links in other webs when renaming a topic, and consider performance impact with every request for a plugin.

-- VickiBrown - 31 Jul 2007