Moin and notifications

[Ray Van Dolson]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2007 at 10:42:58PM +0100, Kostas Georgiou wrote:
> > >It'd require patches to moin.  IE: We'd either have to get rid of all of 
> > >the users or gut the mailing section of the wiki I guess.  Just a 
> > >reminder to those that aren't familiar with it.  Moin iterates over 
> > >every user who has page watch lists (currently in the thousands) to find 
> > >out who to notify.  As the number of our users increases and as the 
> > >number of the pages they watch increase moin gets slower and slower on 
> > >page saves.
> > >
> > It would be doable though.  When I looked ~ a year ago, there were only 
> > two places in the code that would need to be hacked to replace the email 
> > subsystem.  I imagine we could find a single point in the code to hack 
> > if we just made finding the subscribed pages function return 
> > 'fedora-wiki-commits-list at r.c' instead of parsing each user's config 
> > file and returning that list.
> 
> With a quick look at the code it seems quite simple to make the changes,
> the only issue that I can see is if there are any pages that have acls
> that don't allow all users to view them.
> 

It would be fairly simple to fix -- or at least band-aid.  I had done
some initial testing and work on this, but unfortunately I moved in
real life and work started taking up more time.  A somewhat brief
overview of the problem and profiler output of where the slowdowns are
is listed here:

  http://wiki.bludgeon.org/FedoraProject/MoinOptimize

At this point I don't know where upstream is at implementing fixes that
might help this out.

I hope to take a look at this again at some point, but someone else is
welcome to as well.  Seems like it would be much less work than
switching to a completely different wiki platform.

Although there is something to be said for the Moin team perhaps being
focused on more small-scale sites whereas MediaWiki's dev team has to
handle a site of much larger scale :)

Ray