As I reported before, ikiwiki is slow. That's not true anymore: I received an e-mail from Joey Hess that contained a patch to my website and an answer to my problem: He used a copy of the source of my website to reproduce the problems I had, which even took 68 minutes on his computer!

So I grabbed the latest version of ikiwiki from git today and found out:

ikiwiki exits with exit status 0, but does not produce a website!

I reported it to Joey on IRC, who fixed that some hours later in commit 587e0c3d21dfbde052e0fd71a7ed0e33e09e757f. Now comes the interesting part: I added some timing information to ikiwikitest.sh, which allows me to run the latest ikiwiki version, without installing it. And here are the results:

no-refresh, no changes: ~70 seconds
no-refresh, created one new file: ~70 seconds
--refresh, no changes: ~5 seconds
--refresh, changes to one file: ~10 seconds
--refresh, adding a new tag: ~10 seconds

The tests were done using ikiwiki 3.20091017-22-gba682e0 (from git describe). To summarise:

• Updating my website using ikiwiki now takes less than 30 seconds.
• Joey did a great job.
• I owe him something.

I think I should send Joey some money.

I want to emphasise this very much, because he's a FOSS developer, like me. He has spent a lot of time developing and maintaining ikiwiki and will probably continue to do so. Besides that he does a great job in supporting his users.

Everything for free.

I think just writing here about him and telling everybody that he does a great job does not fill his stomach, nor gives him the ability to enjoy a coffee in the early afternoon.

When you read this article, Joey will already know about it and also knows, that I would like to have his IBAN, to submit him some money.

I encourage you to do the same when you realise that you enjoy using some software (or reading some documentation).