Question

Has anyone had experience in splitting a TWiki site - not one web into several but one site into several, moving webs from a site into another tree on another server / cluster?

The company that employs me currently has approximately 850 webs in the corporate TWIki. Performamce has become an issue of great importance.

Requests to install a plugin are considered based more on their hypothetical performance impact than on their usefulness.

When topic are renamed, it is no longer possible to search for, let alone update, links in other webs.

In the past two weeks, the site has gone into forced read-only mode at least three times that I've seen. I get timeouts regularly.

I've been wondering how arduous it would be to split the site, moving a bunch of "related" webs to another server. Inter-web links would be an issue, but I was thinking we could handle these with the InterWiki plugin, which we have installed. The naming convention is different but similar.

Has anyone had experience doing such a thing?

Environment

-- VickiBrown - 31 Jul 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.

Before splitting the site I'd consider a couple of other approaches:

1. Accelerators (mod_perl or SpeedyCGI)
2. Cacheing (there are various extensions for helping with this)

-- CrawfordCurrie - 01 Aug 2007

Would the easiest approach be to duplicate the whole thing, then delete webs from the copies?

-- WhitBlauvelt - 01 Sep 2007

I would not spit up the TWiki site, you would risk to create data silos.

I know of TWiki sites with with over 1000 webs and over 200,000 pages. If your wiki gets large you need a load balanced setup with 3 or more webservers pointing to a storage server via NFS.

This will bring better performance. However, a topic rename searching for backlinks in all webs will remain slow. Try to local renames only.

Look also for a speedy search solution. There are several open source Extensions:search solutions available. Contact me if you need an integration with the Google Search Appliance.

-- PeterThoeny - 03 Sep 2007

Search isn't even our biggest problem. We drop into "Read-only Twiki" mode sometimes twice a day. The site just stops responding normally. Sigh.

-- VickiBrown - 05 Sep 2007

Closing this question since the original question seems to be answered.

-- PeterThoeny - 18 Oct 2007