TiddlyHost: opening and saving wikis noticeably slow

I agree with supporting @simon but depending on your needs the paid subscription is a pricy in my opinion. $8 is a bit high for me as I only have 3 sites that clock in at less than 5 MB. It’d be nice to have the save history feature but not at that price. If I had over 100 like @twMat then I’d definitely go for the paid plan.

I understand you’re merely using me as an example but, since you do mention me specifically I’d like to note that I also only have some 3 sites for my personal use! The rest of them are all for development of plugins, TW issue demos, etc, i.e for contributing to the community.

There is definitely something going on with Tiddlyhost performance currently.

I’m very keen to figure out what the cause is and fix it, but right now I don’t have a clear understanding of what the bottleneck (or bottlenecks are). I’ve got an issue open to track investigating, see Performance problems · Issue #342 · simonbaird/tiddlyhost · GitHub .

Apologies, and thanks very much for your patience and support.

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One thing I’ve always wondered is, with thousands of sites, how do you know that a bad actor hasn’t planted a link farm? Do you check logs for possible abuse?

Thanks!

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@simon, are there any variables that you’d like TiddlyHost community help tracking — in terms of times, site size, external-core vs regular full-html versions etc.? So far I haven’t found any clear patterns on my own, but if there are any factors that are especially worth tracking, I’m happy to do so.

@Bearking we may add to what you are getting and say you could have only three, even one large wiki, you could be accessing multiple times a day, using bandwidth and because of Simon’s effort there is an opportunity to benefit, TiddlyHost is sitting there waiting, if you need to run up a new wiki others can see, rapidly.* As this performance issues shows sometimes Simon needs to drop what he is doing to give this attention.

This is all very good for $8 a month, but of course we each need to understand our own finances, and $8 can be more or less depending on your own circumstances.

No pressure just encouragement :nerd:

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Following up on a few items here:

  • I think (touch wood, fingers crossed, etc) the performance problems are largely resolved. The thing that helped most was installing a robots.txt file to instruct web-crawlers not to relentlessly follow every filter and sort link in the “Explore” page. Since doing that I’ve seen the CPU load chart look much more healthy, and I’ve not seen the frequent slowness, where it would take 10 seconds or so to display any page. And, as a bonus, I found and fixed a few other bugs while troubleshooting the performance.
  • Thanks for the feedback @Bearking. Perhaps a cheaper option for light users is something to consider. I was building the subscription code roughly when “Twitter Blue” came out for $8 a month, so that was an inspiration for the price point. Interestingly the $ per MB costs are super low, which is why I haven’t worried too much about data caps. What does contribute to costs is the network traffic to read and write data, and of course the cost of the server itself.
  • @Mark_S would you mind if I added your .ps1 file to tiddlyhost/examples at main · simonbaird/tiddlyhost · GitHub ? Or would you like to make a PR to do that yourself?
  • @Mark_S There are a few things I check, but yeah, the potential for bad actors to cause trouble is something I worry about.
  • @Springer (and others), thanks so much for sharing your enthusiasm for Tiddlyhost (here and elsewhere), and for the kindness and encouragement. It’s appreciated!
  • @Springer again, I can do some queries and produce reports on those kind of statistics (size, kind, etc). Perhaps I’ll share something like that in the future, it might be interesting.
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Fantastic!

I can confirm that at least at the moment, even larger sites are loading responsively.

So I’ll stop worrying about replicating all my stuff at github (whew — since it would have required getting some IT people involved in changing some backend stuff!), and focus again on the delightful ease of working with TiddlyHost.

Supporting a project like TiddlyHost is surely a strange gig, with long intervals of having things coast along, and then an occasional unpredictable spike in urgent questions or concerns.

Many many thanks!!

That does seem weird. Maybe it has to do with the steady rise of our AI overlords, which I obviously welcome :wink:

@simon , I’m afraid it might still not be quite stable. I just got a time out and it’s uneven in loading times, even if often better than a few days ago. Especially things like cloning and downloading/uploading wikis seem to be slow. So I guess your interventions do improve things (great!) but they might not resolve the actual, or the full, issue…?

Alas, I too have had mixed results this morning.

I do think (based on experience since yesterday) that it’s on the whole more responsive than at peak-quagmire time.

Still, I remain worried about relying on it for pedagogical iframes within an LMS system (I’d need to give students special instructions about how to control-click/right-click to access contextual menu and try the reload command within the iframe — without reloading the whole LMS interface — and that’s just a bit too fiddly).

Has this been ruled out as a potential culprit ?

[EDIT: This was probably a red herring.]

@simon
Oh-oooh I just had a thought! Check out this, i.e the bit about that the “roaming” for links.tiddlywiki.org was “switched on” about two weeks ago, possibly after some time of hiatus. Might it have something to do with it? @saqimtiaz might the frequency for fetching links, or some other setting have been changed from previously?

EDIT: Ironically, exactly my links-contributing wiki seems to have been dis-engaged from links.tiddlywiki.org …? Last contribution is now from January (i.e by someone else), but my contributions that were added some 1-2 weeks ago did show for a while.

This might be another thread. You’re not listed on the contributor’s page. I’m wondering if the poll process is throwing an error. There are 5 contributors missing. Including you, and Simon

It’s hard to see a connection unless … the broken polling process is looping through all the sites rather than completing. I would think Simon could spot the excess activity in the logs.

I think I’m just going to blame CrowdStrike.

It’s a qualified guess that also Simon has his links-site on TH. Do you happen to know where the other three missing ones are hosting their sites? Of the people still listed as contributors, I do note two (Jeremy and clutterstack) that use a TH site for link sharing.

Another thing; the topics have decreased from 375 two weeks ago to only 258 now. Either heavy pruning has been done or something is not fetched in the same way, it seems.

Ok, I think it’s the other way around. You’re not seeing your links contributions because you’re on tiddlyhost and tiddlyhost is timing out.

Oh! You’re back.

So every hour, when the polling happens, you and the other TH users may or may not be polled.

TiddlyWiki links is rebuilt every 17 minutes. There are 8 URLs from TiddlyHost that are fetched once every 17 minutes. I therefore strongly doubt that Links is causing any performance problems for TiddlyHost. Do note that I do not maintain Links, it is a community project and maintained in much the same manner as the TiddlyWiki core.

OK, red herring about links.

Hupp! Indeed! And so are the 300+ links!

I got the 1 hour from your GH post two weeks ago. I remembered it as something like 20 minutes, but also remembered there was discussion of extending the time.

It’s the other way around – problems with TH are causing contributions to appear and disappear from the collection.

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