As you probably know, this website is generated by ikiwiki, which does a pretty nice job for people who like to write their websites without a fancy GUI, but still do not want to write HTML or XHTML directly.

As I migrated some parts of my other websites into this one, I realised that ikiwiki becomes slower and slower.

A normal run with

ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup

takes about 15 minutes! If I run it with

ikiwiki --setup ikiwiki.setup --refresh

it still takes about 1-2 minutes. I clearly understand that my site is not the smallest anymore (

[16:38] ikn:nicoweb% find . -type f | wc -l
31015
[16:38] ikn:nicoweb% find . -type d | wc -l
3092

), but I still think that it should be possible to (re-)generate it in less than 30 seconds. I know that the author, Joey Hess, is very open to feedback and does a great job, but as I always regenerate the website before a public release and that costs my time, it motivated me to write this article.

Dear Joey, keep up the good work, but speedup ikiwiki, please!