On Thu, 22 Mar 2001, Adam C. Engst wrote:
> I'm new to Swiki and have only played with the Mac implementation
> briefly (separate comments on that). But a non-profit standard
> organization I chair is looking into using Swiki for a lot of our
> public information, probably running on Linux. We love the access
> controls to prevent change access on select pages, and Swiki's
> formatting controls seem better than most.
And easy to customize.
> What we remain a little concerned about because we have no experience
> with it are the reliability, stability, portability, and performance
> issues. I'm hoping people here can set my mind at ease about some of
> these issues.
Reliability: Varies. Thinking specifically about uptime, there tendt o be
platform and VM specific issues. Swiki.net has custom networking
primatives for the NT platform and from what I understand has excellent
uptime. Otherwise, at the moment, Linux seems to do the best, especially
with the 3.0 image/vm combo.
Portability: Terrific, pace the other problems. Getting pages in and out
is easy, and Squeak itself runs on many many platforms.
Performance: Hard to say. We're not thrashing apache yet. OTOH, Comswiki's
rendering functions are pretty nippy.
> * How many pages can an Swiki hold and keep working well?
Hasn't hit a limit yet. There certainly have been >1000 pages, highish
volume Swikis.
Pages are stored as text files. Some information is kept in memory, but
that's much smaller than a typically page. Assuming fairly modest memory
constraints, you should be good for quite large sites.
Some pages, like recent, default to showing the entire list of pages (hmm,
that may have changed). It's worth altering that if your site gets very
large since it's both dynamically generated and gets rather large.
> * Has anyone seen significant performance problems at a certain
> number of simultaneous users?
Yes.
> Has serious performance testing been
> done?
Yes.
> * How stable is the Linux version of the software? I just saw the
> concerns about the NT/2000 version. Obviously, since this would be a
> production server for what we hope will become an increasingly
> high-profile standard, uptime is important.
I haven't heard of problems with a properly configured Linux VM. Anyone
else?
The NT/2000 thing is weird, given swiki.net's *better* success with NT.
> * How are individual pages stored, should we need to export
> information to use in a different system at some point in the future?
XML. Very very very easy.
> (I see there's a Render function, though I don't have a sense of why
> one would use that, since the documentation is, shall we say, sparse.)
Renders to static html pages. One strategy is to use Squeak for dynamic
bits and another server for static bits (very helpful with the navigation
gifs which just strain the system for no good end).
> * Similarly, is there any concern with corruption of pages, if
> they're not just stored as text files?
No. See above.
> * Is it possible to delete an individual page, assuming that it's
> something that simply has no future relevance?
People tend not to. There's no built-in way, I recall. Since you can
rename pages, it's pretty easy to recycle names (if that's a concern).
> * Is there any problem with standard backup approaches,
No.
> or does Swiki
> have any additional backup capabilities?
Each page's entire editing history is stored, and in a separate text file
(xml again).
> Thanks for any experience you can provide!
It's worth getting familiar with Squeak. Mark's book is a handy thing to
have around.
Don't hesitate to ask :)
Cheers,
Bijan.
