Question

Hi, I am currently reviewing wiki software with the view to implementing one in my workplace. The last organisation I worked for used TWiki so it has the advantage of my familiarity. However, in comparing TWiki with other wiki offerings I am disappointed with the performance of Twiki's search feature. Even on this website a search of the term 'extensions' took over 50 seconds to return results.

Is there a means of improving the performance of TWiki's search feature that is not implemented on your website? Are there any plans to improve Twiki's default search performance in future releases?

Thanks,

Environment

-- TWikiGuest - 17 May 2008

Answer

If you answer a question - or have a question you asked answered by someone - please remember to edit the page and set the status to answered. The status is in a drop-down list below the edit box.

TWiki's real time search is powerful (needed when creating sophisticated TWiki applications), but it has a limit in scaling. If your intranet TWiki has more than 50,000 pages it is advised to use a search engine to index the content. TWiki offers several Extensions:search that you can integrate into the skin. See also TWikiScalability.

-- PeterThoeny - 17 May 2008

Note that actually any web search engine can index TWiki. If your company already has one (such as a Google box), just use it. We use aspseek and mnogosearch at work for instance.

You can also just check that you have enough RAM on your server, and no other process than TWiki on it that can eat up this RAM. For instance I created 50,000 TWiki topics in a web on my personal server (2G ram, consumer grade disk), searching them the first time took 45s but afterwards 3s. (and I guess we could go even lower, as a grep on these took less than 0.5s) These 50,000 topics eat only 200k RAM, it should be easy to set up things so that they stay in the cache.

-- ColasNahaboo - 20 May 2008