Bolzano Technical Apologia

(Just some notes for the moment. More later.)

Most wikis use sophisticated database programs to store their pages. This has some advantages, notably speed.

In contrast, Bolzano stores its pages as plain text files. This system is inefficient for very large wikis, but it’s the best system for small wikis, because it makes it trivial to do backup and, more importantly, recovery. Recovering old or broken databases is a pain. And in fact this design scales well to medium-sized wikis, and will scale better and better as file systems improve in the future. It already scales much better than it did when I first started working on this sort of design a few years ago.

See http://www.varnish-cache.org/trac/wiki/ArchitectNotes for more on memory versus disk. That site also explains how to set up a varnish cache server, which I recommend you do if you’re really worried about Bolzano’s performance.