On this wiki, editing `templates/gitbranch.mdwn` causes a really slow refresh, orders of magnitude slower than a full rebuild: a large number of pages depend on that template, or link to a page that embeds that template, and so on. I suspect that, as with my optimization pass for `album`'s benefit, the costly thing is evaluating lots of pagespecs. I'm profiling it to see whether the problem is there are any low-hanging fruit. Easy to reproduce offline: * comment out the `exclude` option in `docwiki.setup` * `/usr/bin/perl -Iblib/lib ikiwiki.in -setup docwiki.setup -rebuild` * `touch templates/gitbranch.mdwn` * `/usr/bin/perl -Iblib/lib ikiwiki.in -setup docwiki.setup -refresh` NYTProf says: # spent 279s (237+41.8) within IkiWiki::bestlink which was called 13988949 times, avg 20µs/call: # 13150827 times (222s+37.2s) by IkiWiki::PageSpec::match_link at line 2692, avg 20µs/call # 829606 times (14.9s+4.51s) by IkiWiki::PageSpec::match_link at line 2687, avg 23µs/call ... sub bestlink ($$) { which is about half the execution time (458s on my laptop). Adding code to log each call to match_backlink indicates that a large part of the problem is that it evaluates the pagespec `backlink(plugins/goodstuff)` up to a million times, with various pages and locations. --[[smcv]] > [[!template id=gitbranch branch=smcv/ready/perf author="[[Simon McVittie|smcv]]" browse=http://git.pseudorandom.co.uk/smcv/ikiwiki.git/shortlog/refs/heads/ready/perf]] > [[!tag patch users/smcv/ready]] > > Previously, if a page like `plugins/trail` contained a conditional like > > \[[!if test="backlink(plugins/goodstuff)" all=no]] > > (which it gets via `templates/gitbranch`), then the > [[plugins/conditional]] plugin would give `plugins/trail` a dependency on > `(backlink(plugins/goodstuff)) and plugins/trail`. This dependency is > useless: that pagespec can never match any page other than > `plugins/trail`, but if `plugins/trail` has been modified or deleted, > then it's going to be rendered or deleted *anyway*, so there's no point > in spending time evaluating match_backlink for it. > > Conversely, the influences from the result were not taken into account, > so `plugins/trail` did not have the > `{ "plugins/goodstuff" => $DEPEND_LINKS }` dependency that it should. > > We should invert that, depending on the influences but not on the test. > > This is at least an order of magnitude faster: when I edit the docwiki > as described above, a refresh takes 37s with nytprof overhead, compared > with 458s with nytprof overhead before this change. Without nytprof, > that refresh takes 14s, which is faster than the 24s rebuild again. > I didn't record how long the refresh took without nytprof before this > change, but it was something like 200s. > > `bestlink` is still the single most expensive function in this refresh > at ~ 9.5s, with `match_glob` at ~ 5.2s as the runner-up. > --[[smcv]]