Developer information

Setting up a profiling environment

How setup a profiling environment in less then 5 minutes:

Setup standalone server in your wiki directory

Open moin.py, uncomment the hotshot profile lines:

    # Hotshot profile (default commented)
    import hotshot
    hotshotProfile = hotshot.Profile("moin.prof")

Copy MoinMoin/scripts/print_stats.py to your wiki dir

How to run a profile

Run moin.py
Do some request using a browsers or ab
Quit moin.py
Run python print_stats.py moin.prof

Profiles

/CgiProfiles
/EmptyPage - The general overhead of the wiki
/HugePage - Very long page, only text
/RecentChanges - The most important page, dynamic
/FrontPage - The most visited page
/SearchTitles - Very important for a wiki, should be very fast
/SearchText - Very important for a wiki
/TitleIndex - Page with links to all pages
/CategoryPage - Using search macros
/GetRevCallStack - Get_Rev is the most used function in our code. Mostly because it is called too often and in useless cases.
/OldProfiles - old stuff we should sort or delete
/FileSystem - how MoinMoin accesses the file system

System information

See /SystemInformation for the configuration of the developers which publish profile data.

Profiling hints

The most annoying problem are the regressions compared to MoinMoin 1.2.x. So we should profile a simple test case for 1.2 and 1.3. Then we can compare the profiles and spot the new bottle necks.

Things to improve

Use a caching SRE compiler. Bastian prepared some code ...
- SRE calls are in the top 5 of the Moin 1.3 profile

Groups

Things to fix:

check on save if any group file haas changed and update only the changed file
make ACL code load groups only when needed

Speed up CGI

should be updated after import stuff fix, as it affects lots of code.

If you request the standard FrontPage:
- 33% of the time is spent in request.__init__ 2004-12-17
  - 50% in RequestBase.__init__
  - 50% in RequestCGI.__init__
  - it is not easy to optimise that
    - much of it is config loading
- 27% of the time is spent in wikiutil.send_title 2004-12-17
  - 66% in modern:Theme.header
    - editbar and navibar are slow

MoinMoin: MoinProfiling