Re: [Gnewsense-dev] Fwd: Website issue

[Paul Boddie]

On Saturday 3. September 2016 01.43.33 Nandakumar Edamana wrote:
> > Done...Does anyone still see extreme slowness?
> 
> Thanks for doing that. As Paul said, the new page loads instantly
> while the other pages are still unavailable. However, now we are sure
> that there is no issue with the server core. The problem seems to be
> with our CMS.

I think it could be just some kind of issue with MoinMoin, and perhaps the 
profiling information can be enabled to get an idea of where it is spending 
its time.

> I strongly suggest replacing the default main page with a simple HTML
> file that shows an overall idea about gNewSense, important (working)
> download links and a message informing that the site is under
> maintenance. Otherwise people coming from Wikipedia and Google will
> hate gNewSense from very beginning. Should I help preparing the page?

"Hate" might be a bit of a strong word, but I see your point.

Now, I loaded the RecentChanges page and it was a lot quicker than the main 
page to appear. The RecentChanges page uses dynamic information, but it is 
fairly optimised (being a central feature of MoinMoin), whereas the main page 
contains mostly static information and yet takes several times longer to load 
than RecentChanges.

I loaded the raw text of the main page which, after having looked at the main 
page in its normal form, took place almost instantly:

http://www.gnewsense.org/Main/HomePage?action=raw

I also looked at various linked pages in raw form (but not in normal form), 
just to exclude the effects of rendering, image loading, and so on. Some 
loaded quickly, others (the Screenshots page) took a long time. It wasn't 
clear whether caching was having an effect, either within MoinMoin or at the 
filesystem level, or whether there could be a general resource use problem 
that causes parts of MoinMoin to get swapped to disk, or something like that.

One thing that could help in profiling is the show_timings setting in the wiki 
configuration:

https://moinmo.in/HelpOnConfiguration#style

Note that MoinMoin's caching mechanism should be fairly effective at 
"compiling" pages and returning them quickly. It's possible that this 
mechanism isn't functioning correctly - dirty caches are possibly the primary 
issue in Moin maintenance - and thus things are a lot slower, but when the 
serving up of raw text is slow, I'd suspect something else. (It doesn't cache 
the raw text as far as I know, since that's just a straight copy of the text 
to the response.)

Paul