[darcs-users] "Static Gitit" site.

Trent W. Buck trentbuck at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 00:39:13 UTC 2009


Daniel Carrera <daniel.carrera at theingots.org> writes:

> Eric Kow wrote:
>> I think we should give darcsit (*) a second chance.
>
> Ok. But I'll mention that OpenOffice has had exactly the same problem
> for many years (but using CVS instead of Darcs) and they have never
> found a solution to the speed problems other than to "staticize" the
> website from time to time.
>
> My personal opinion is that running a website directly off of a SCM is
> a mistake. But oh well.

ikiwiki works by serving static pages.  The static pages are recompiled
by a post-apply hook.  Thus, the cost of serving a page is low, but the
cost of an edit is high (particularly since several index pages need to
be recompiled).  I think browser-based editing is done by having a CGI
script that edits the working tree and then does a commit.

I get the impression that for every GET request, gitit

    1. Asks Darcs when the source document was last changed.
    2. If it is more recent than the cached HTML version,
       recompiles the cached HTML version.
    3. Serves the cached HTML version.

I don't really see why this needs to be done for every READ, instead of
for every WRITE.  It seems to me that reads are orders of magnitude more
frequent than writes.



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