Official Foswiki Weblog

When Foswiki emerged from the ashes of the TW*ki (TM) project, server infrastructure was needed in a hurry. At that time, I happened to have available a brand new server. Bought by a customer, but no immediate deployment plans. Foswiki.org lived happily on that server for months. However, recently the server was reclaimed by the customer and foswiki.org had to move. This weekend I configured and installed the new server, and I must say: i’m happy with the result.

4 250GB disks

Although providing less CPU power (a quad core Xeon CPU at 2.00GHz), the new server surpasses the previous one on disk-I/O: with 4 250GB 7200RPM SATA-II disks each with 8MB cache, a RAID 1+0 setup gives us 500GB of fast storage. The decrease in CPU power is insignificant against this improvement in I/O-throughput; foswiki is I/O-bound in nature, not CPU-bound. This also goes for the subversion repository. By the way, the server has 6GB of memory.

The new server was paid for by my company, Sonologic. I hope to recover some of the investment by donations from the community, and so far 5 people have pledged an amount already (covering about a third of the cost). Colocation and bandwidth is provided free of charge to the project.

Connected to the net

The server capacity more than suffices for the task at hand (hosting foswiki.org and the subversion repository), but plans are in place to distribute the load among multiple servers. On the one hand we want to distribute web page requests for the wiki geographically, with multiple servers distributed around the globe. On the other hand, whereas now all services run on one server, in the future (near-future I hope) this might prove to be too much. At that point, we will have to move the subversion repository, for example, to another server.

But that is all in the future. For now, the Foswiki community can be happy with having their own server. I want to thank the govcom.org foundation for hosting the Foswiki community up until now, giving us time to sort things out!

kmartens Uncategorized Development, foswiki, server

Did you ever ask yourself how one can improve the WebIndex in Foswiki, that simply lists the entries of a Foswiki-Web in alphabetical order? Andrew R. Jones created a Best Practice Tip on Foswiki.org and in his weblog (Improving the Web Index in Foswiki using the Filter Plugin):

In a standard Foswiki setup there is a topic in every web called WebTopicList, which is linked to from the side bar as Index. By default it simply lists all the topics in one big list, as shown below (or view onfoswiki.org):

This certainly isn’t very elegant. Luckily by using Michael Daum’s Filter Plugin we can improve the index by giving it some structure and making it more like a directory, as shown below:

To do this we only need to make a small change to the WebTopicList in the System web. Since all the other webs simply import that page the changes will be immediately visible across the wiki with just the one change.

Edit the WebTopicList topic and replace this line:

%TOPICLIST{"   * [[%BASEWEB%.$name][$name]]"}%

With this:

%MAKEINDEX{"%TOPICLIST{"$name" separator=","}%" cols="3" header="$anchors" format="[[%BASEWEB%.$item][$item]]"}%

Thats it! You now get a much more friendly and useful index in all of your webs.

Note: This tip has also been made available on foswiki.org.

mseibert Tips ajones, andrew jones, best practice, Development, features, foswiki, help, navigation, overview, webindex