I just noticed that Python 2.4 was released at the end of November. Fedora Core 3 RPMs are already available from the Python.org site. It’s supposed to have better performance than 2.3, so I may have to try it on my website to see if it will speed up my MoinMoin wiki, which is frustratingly slow.
Of course, this prompted me to check out the Moin Moin site, and I was pleased to discover that version 1.3 was released last week. New features that will cause me to upgrade soon:
- An antispam feature that “compares the page content against known spam patterns” when saving pages. A blacklist feature is also included.
- Enhanced search features, including regular expressions, case sensitive and title search
- Underlay directory to keep system and help pages separate. This will make later upgrades much easier.
- The new modern theme is much nicer than the old default theme
My website is on a shared server and I’m running MoinMoin on Apache via CGI. If my site were on a dedicated server, I’m sure I could get much better performance by running it on Twisted or on Apache with mod_python. I’m pretty sure my webhost doesn’t have mod_python installed. I’ve got to figure out some way to find out why it is so slow, though.
I’m very happy about the anti-spam feature. Until now, I’ve not posted any links to my wiki, because I’ve been afraid that spammers will find it.
Okay, it’s clear that I’ll be upgrading both Python and MoinMoin on my website soon. If I can’t figure out a way to speed up MoinMoin, though, I will likely give MediaWiki a try.
I ran mediawiki on dreamhost. It’s not particulary good software. After digging through the source, I was pretty surprised that WikiPedia runs. (No offense to any MediaWiki hackers out there, I’m sure it’s better than it was)
It _is_ faster than MoinMoin, which I also run on dreamhost.
I wonder if using something like Psyco on MoinMoin will speed things up.
I manage a server at work that runs MoinMoin 1.2.4 – and I found it to be painfully slow compared to the old version (0.11, i believe). Specifically, it was slow when posting an edited page – it took ~5 minutes!
I poked around for a while, and found that the problem lies in the anti-spammer functionality, which apparently was put into place before 1.3 – it’s in 1.2.4 as well. Since our Wiki server is inside a corporate Intranet, we don’t care so much about the anti-spam feature, so I removed one line from moin_config.py:
from MoinMoin.util.antispam import SecurityPolicy
Voila! Worked like a charm – no slowdowns in MoinMoin at all! Turns out that the antispam feature was going and checking the blacklist, which is out on the ‘Net – and taking forever to timeout. Removing the check fixed the problem.
If you really care about blocking spammers, just set up an ACL – give editing privileges to those you know and trust.
Thanks for the tip Aaron! I’m using MoinMoin 1.3, but I didn’t find a reference to the antispam module in my moin_config.py. Hmm, maybe I missed something during the upgrade.
However, when I did change moin_config.py to use ACLs to prevent unknown users from editing it, MoinMoin mysteriously started performing better. Then again, the performance has varied up and down over time, so maybe it is more tied to what else is running on the shared server where my site is hosted. Probably, this was just a good night.
I’ll definitely watch out for performance issues with the antispam module in the future, though. I guess I should also check to see if I am missing anything else from the moin_config file.