(TW5) trying to determine optimal tiddler size

[Raymond McDowell]

I use TW for everything (by everything I mean as a database, a writing environment, task development, et. al.), and prefer to keep it all in a single file. However, I find that some of my entries (e.g. novel length stories, long articles, long lists et. al.) slow down the beast to the point it becomes unusable. From what I read and from my own experience, I find if I keep the entries shorter, TW5 zooms from entry to entry at breakneck speed, regardless of the number of entries. My question is what is the size limit for entries if I want to keep the process flowing.

[Jed Carty]

I haven't seen any discussion about how tiddler size affects performance. I know that it is affected by the complexity of the wikitext much more than the number of tiddlers. I don't think I have ever had tiddlers that were just text and long enough to have any effect.

[PMario]

Hi Raymond,

As Jed wrote. The size of a tiddler didn't affect performance for me. May be, because mine are short :)

So to give us a better feeling, what "novel length" means for you, you can do the following.

 - With your TW open, type F12    .... This will open the browser debug tools.
 - There should be a tab "Console"  ... select it.
 - Copy paste the following line there. ... but replace "HelloThere" with the title, of one of your long tiddlers.

$tw.wiki.getTiddler("HelloThere").fields.text.split(" ").length

This line counts the number of words in your tiddler. ... It's not very precise since something like this: ".. .." will create length=2 :/
But it should give us a feeling, for your tiddler sizes.

It would be nice to know, how many "long tiddlers" you have. ... With the numbers, it would be possible to run some real tests.

have fun!
mario

[Raymond McDowell]

Here's an example. Please note this is one of many. One entry. Plain text.307,832 characters. 56,458 words in its full completed state. Not really a long story in today's world. It barely qualifies as a short novel.  No links, no special formatting. Just words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs.  When I put it all in a single  tiddler in an empty tiddlywiki (version 5.1.9), save the TW, reopen the entry, which admittedly only takes 2 - 3 seconds when it's the only tiddler in the wiki, then write "this is a test" at the top of the page, there is about a 10 second lag. That's way to much in my world when I should be well into a paragraph.

So I acknowledge my entries need to be smaller. Broken down by chapters, scenes, whatever.  Conversely, in its present state, where I've broken it into chapters, the first chapter (18,408 characters, 3,394 words) there is no problem opening it even though I've used a little transclusion, a couple of tags and a couple of hyper-links.  Responsiveness is no issue.This is true whether I'm using my desktop or my android tablet. 

I was just wondering if there was any rule of thumb I might apply. Evidently not.

[PMario]

On Saturday, August 1, 2015 at 2:16:24 PM UTC+2, Raymond McDowell wrote:

I was just wondering if there was any rule of thumb I might apply. Evidently not.

Very interesting usecase. ...

IMO we are still seeing new usecases, that we didn't expect, or test. So, at least for me, there is no fast answer.

TW renders most of the page elements with every keystroke. So the delay you see seems to come from this behaviour.
With your new numbers, imo we are able to create test cases and we should be able to suggest improvements.

@Jeremy .. any thoughts?

have fun!
mario

[Jeremy Ruston]

Hi Raymond

Apologies for the late reply.

> Plain text.307,832 characters. 56,458 words in its full completed state. Not really a long story in today's world. It barely qualifies as a short novel.  No links, no special formatting. Just words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs.  When I put it all in a single  tiddler in an empty tiddlywiki (version 5.1.9), save the TW, reopen the entry, which admittedly only takes 2 - 3 seconds when it's the only tiddler in the wiki, then write "this is a test" at the top of the page, there is about a 10 second lag. That's way to much in my world when I should be well into a paragraph. 

Very interesting. You are working with tiddlers much larger than I use for testing; my focus for TiddlyWiki is for it to work well with relatively small chunks of text.

Having said that, I'd like it to behave OK with much larger tiddlers, too. As an experiment, I copied and pasted the text of Jane Austen's "Emma", about 160,000 words. On my two year old laptop performance was fine; I could edit the tiddler without discernible lag.

So, I'm afraid the situation is that what constitutes a tiddler that is too big to work with depends on your hardware...

Best wishes

Jeremy.

 

On Sat, Aug 1, 2015 at 5:07 PM, PMario <pmar...@gmail.com> wrote:

On Saturday, August 1, 2015 at 2:16:24 PM UTC+2, Raymond McDowell wrote:

I was just wondering if there was any rule of thumb I might apply. Evidently not.

Very interesting usecase. ...

IMO we are still seeing new usecases, that we didn't expect, or test. So, at least for me, there is no fast answer.

TW renders most of the page elements with every keystroke. So the delay you see seems to come from this behaviour.

With your new numbers, imo we are able to create test cases and may be able to suggest improvements.

@Jeremy .. any thoughts?

have fun!
mario

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[PMario]

Raymond,

Which browser do you use. ... Do you use any browser addOns?

So you could disable you addOns and see, if it is still slow. ...

Some addOns "watch" for changes in the DOM and perform there actions, if it changes. .. So this may cause some additional slowdown.

just an idea.
-mario

[Raymond McDowell]

Funny you should mention that. I had just reloaded windows 7 and was using a Firefox browser with only TiddlyFox as an add-on when I ran the test I mentioned. As noted before, this is evidently not an issue for other users. I'm trying to adjust to the environment as I go. Right now I'm trying to see if, when I shorten my entries, if I can include everything in a single TiddlyWiki.

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