Question

I just set up a fresh install of TWiki on a mod_perl enabled Apache and using the apache generator I have TWiki clearly using mod_perl and being nice and zippy.

Problem: RCSLite does not appear to use mod_perl and is dreadfully slow by comparison. One person viewing the history of a 90 revision page simply results in a minute long pegging of a processor by a spawned perl process. This was a major issue on our existing TWiki server and I'm hoping there's a way to fix it on the current version. If not, what's the recommended way of making revision checking safe on windows? While it'd be used by at most fifty users at a time, I'm still worried about this.

I tried using GNU RCS, but it gave errors, so I switched to RCSLite which seemed to work well, except for this. I can try addressing that if that's the recommended way to go about this.

Environment

-- PhilipBloom - 01 May 2008

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.

Okay, I added rdiff and oops to the list of files covered by mod_perl and now it is handling it. This may be something to edit into the apache config generator.

That said, while performance seems to be a bit better, it still doesn't strike me as safe. Doing a test of having four users ask for histories between 20-90 revisions at the same time brought the relatively modern machine to a grinding halt for about a minute answering it. Are there other recommended things to do with RCS on windows to allow history to be safe for folks to click on?

-- PhilipBloom - 02 May 2008

We are aware of the performance issue when viewing 90 revisions of a topic. In the Codev web is a proposal (somewhere) to show only the 10 or so latest revisions by default, with paging to see more revisions.

-- PeterThoeny - 02 May 2008

Thanks, Peter.

For reference for anyone who searches this, that topic is here: LimitNumberOfRevisionsDisplayedInHistory

and has a few workarounds that I think will work for me for now.

-- PhilipBloom - 02 May 2008