www.nico.schottelius.org/blog/ikiwiki-has-been-slow.mdwn

[[!meta title="Ikiwiki has been slow, but it is fast now!"]]

As I reported before, [[ikiwiki is slow|blog/ikiwiki-is-slow]].
That's not true anymore: I received an e-mail from
[Joey Hess](http://kitenet.net/~joey/) that contained a
[patch to my website](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=netzseiten/www.nico.schottelius.org;a=commit;h=9ad0b7ba4763f3fe6773427326bcc32dbe332a01) and an answer to my problem:
He used a copy of
[the source of my website](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=netzseiten/www.nico.schottelius.org;a=summary)
to reproduce the problems I had, which even took ***68 minutes*** on his computer!

So I grabbed the latest version of ikiwiki from git today and found out:

    ikiwiki exits with exit status 0, but does not produce a website!

I reported it to Joey on [IRC](irc://irc.freenode.net/#ikiwiki), who fixed
that some hours later in commit
[587e0c3d21dfbde052e0fd71a7ed0e33e09e757f](http://git.ikiwiki.info/?p=ikiwiki;a=commit;h=587e0c3d21dfbde052e0fd71a7ed0e33e09e757f). Now comes the interesting part:
I added some timing information to 
[ikiwikitest.sh](http://git.schottelius.org/?p=nsbin;a=blob;f=ikiwikitest.sh;hb=HEAD),
which allows me to run the latest ikiwiki version, without installing it.
And here are the results:

    no-refresh, no changes: ~70 seconds
    no-refresh, created one new file: ~70 seconds
    --refresh, no changes: ~5 seconds
    --refresh, changes to one file: ~10 seconds
    --refresh, adding a new tag: ~10 seconds

The tests were done using ikiwiki **3.20091017-22-gba682e0**
(from git describe). To summarise:

 * Updating my website using ikiwiki now takes less than 30 seconds.
 * Joey did a great job.
 * I owe him something.

## I think I should send Joey some money.

I want to emphasise this very much, because he's a
[[FOSS developer|docs/the-term-foss]], like [[me|about/foss]].
He has spent a lot of time developing and maintaining ikiwiki
and will probably continue to do so. Besides that he does a great
job in supporting his users.

    Everything for free.

I think just writing here about him and telling everybody that
he does a great job does not fill his stomach, nor gives him the
ability to enjoy a coffee in the early afternoon.

When you read this article, Joey will already know about it and
also knows, that I would like to have his
[IBAN](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Bank_Account_Number),
to submit him some money.

I encourage you to do the same when you realise that you enjoy using
some software (or reading some documentation).

[[!tag foss net unix]]