[WM] Webmake performance

[Duncan Cameron]

On 2002-11-18 Oliver Strutynski wrote:
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>Repost to mailing list:
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>I am currently looking into the possibility of migrating a fairly large German
>university sub-site (1000+ pages and growing) from a home-grown perl-based
>site generator to a webmake based solution.
>
>I have been able to build a fully functional prototype (not converting the
>actual content) pretty fast and was really impressed by how easy it was to
>add section-wide table of contents' to the site. I noticed however, that
>using webmake the site generation was considerably slower than with the
>previous system (factor 10). I also found that the performance is comparable
>when re-generating the entire site (-F).
>
>So I stripped down my webmake file and the content files to include no custom
>perl code at all and even tried re-compiling the web-site with "-r", no
>success. Looking at the source code, I found, that in
>DirOfFiles::get_location_contents webmake opens every single file even if the
>file has not been changed since the last run and also probably processes the
>file with every run. Is there a way to force webmake not to re-generate (and
>preferably not even open) these files? From the last run, webmake should know
>that these files do not contain any dynamic code (custom tags and similar)
>and therefore do not need to be read again.
>
My understanding is that Webmake will not process every single file.
I am not sure what that part of the code which you identified is
actually doing, but in the Main.pm file there is code that seems
to be checking whether files have changed.

What happens if you generate your site, and then generate it again
without changing anything?

You can try running with the -D switch to try to find out what Webmake
thinks that it is doing.

Regards,
Duncan Cameron