[darcs-users] "Static Gitit" site.

Gwern Branwen gwern0 at gmail.com
Tue Apr 21 00:49:12 UTC 2009


On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Trent W. Buck <trentbuck at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.

Suppose someone pushed a bunch of patches. How would checking only on
writes through the web interface interact with that?

-- 
gwern


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