[pmwiki-users] on over-bundling

Patrick R. Michaud pmichaud at pobox.com
Wed Mar 9 00:20:00 CST 2005


On Wed, Mar 09, 2005 at 12:20:07AM -0500, Radu wrote:
> OK, I had started to re-arrange the Cookbook by hand by clustering related 
> entries. However, I realised there's a problem with this approach: 
> maintaining it.

Not to mention that there's more than one clustering available.
This is what Neil and Tom refer to when they say the documentation
is too "flat" -- it's somewhat hard to organize things into a single,
comprehensive view.  


> Con: On second hand, my initial try (using pagelist) takes about 20s for 
> two lists and 15s for Pm's Uploads page, while the much larger Cookbook 
> page takes a mere 2s. It may just be too tough on the server if we make a 
> whole lot of category pages.

The server load doesn't increase with the number of category pages
defined -- it increases with the number of overall pages on the site
and the number of times the category page is viewed.

At any rate, don't let server load on pmwiki.org be a deterrent -- 
if categories are useful enough to solve our page organizations issues, 
then there are several mechanisms available for me to optimize them.
I haven't worried about speed/load issues on categories up to now
simply because I haven't had a situation that warranted it 
(PmWikiPhilosophy #3, as well as the general principle of avoiding 
premature optimizations.)

> Con: Another issue I have with ontologies of any kind: they're artificial. 
> The deeper these hierarchies go, the tougher to maintain them.

They don't have to be hierarchical.

Pm



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