Vricks Wiki Woes

[Vricklund]

I've been serving some plain html pages using a hacked NSLU2 for 5 years or so. It has been running debian lenny on a noname 2GB usb stick, using lighttpd as the webserver and it has worked just fine.

Now, I figured I would leave the 90's behind and migrate to a wiki platform. Installed PHP5 and Dokuwiki but now it's crawling along. I know I only have 266MHz and 32MB of memory to work with but if I check on my system rescources when I load the page I can see that php-cgi use some 30% of the available CPU and RAM for the first seconds then it just idles along using 1-5% for ages until it finally finishes.

So I investigate further, discovering that my processors waiting time is 80-90%. This means my processor waits a LOT for I/O operations. I'm guessing this means writing and reading from the usb stick? Is it failing or just bloody slow? What kind of read/write speeds do I need? Am I crazy thinking I can ever use a flash disk to this?

Without ruining myself I could get a new stick that reads 30MB/s and writes 8MB/s, would that do? Would a proper external HDD have better read/write performance?

[Vricklund]

After some detective work I now know that my current usb stick is 12.5 MB/s read, 1.5MB/s write. Seems that 15-30/8-15 is the normal working range for an external HDD. Maybe it's not the usb stick after all...

[grumbler]

Can't help, I am afraid. 

[Vricklund]

Picked up a new usb stick and I'm looking to reinstall during the weekend (if I can find the time). Have also been experimenting with a more lightweight wiki and it's running much more smoothly. The drawback is that I'm stuck editing config files to get it to work. Try it out.

http://vricklund.se

I've also been looking at upgrading. The soon to be shipped Guruplug seems like a nice alternative. Shipping from within the eu at http://www.newit.co.uk/, so I won't be double taxed.