Question

I am planning to replace a clumzy cvs-based website system with TWiki. I actually have two questions:

1) We currently have an internationalization system which automatically presents the correct translation of the website depending on the language code sent by the user's browser. Can something similar be achieved in TWiki?

2) How efficient is TWiki. We often get over 10,000 hits per day, and sometimes get mentioned on sites like Slashdot which leads to very high load. Our web server has the bandwidth (we are on SourceForge too), but is TWiki efficient enough to handle high loads?

• TWiki version: 1st Dec 2001
• Web server: Apache
• Server OS: Linux
• Web browser: All
• Client OS: Any

-- IanClarke - 24 Dec 2001

Answer

1) Internationalization:

I assume that you manually translate the page decoration like header & footer (not page content) and would like to serve the language identified by the browser. You could probably do that with skins. Create skins for each language (i.e. view.de.tmpl for German). In each TWiki script determine the language and activate the appropriate skin. Example for view script:

    my $skin  =  $query->param( "skin" )
              || &TWiki::Prefs::getPreferencesValue( "SKIN" )
              || getLanguageFromBrowser();
    # get view template, standard view or a view with a different skin
    $tmpl = &TWiki::Store::readTemplate( "view", $skin );

If you want to machine translate the page content you could do that by offering links to Altavista's Babelfish.

2) Efficiency: At work we have a busy TWiki site with 2000 to 3000 hits per day. This installation is regular cgi,not mod_perl. If you run under mod_perl you probably could handle the load. Alternatively you could generate static HTML pages out of TWiki and let users browse those. The pages could have regular Edit links pointing back to the cgi script. You could create the static HTML pages nightly and after each topic save (there is a lot of dynamic stuff going on, so creating static HTML pages only after topic save would not work.)

-- PeterThoeny - 06 Jan 2002