PbWiki bogged down a LOT as my 20+ fifth graders worked on their pages in the computer lab yesterday.

Thanks for the replies. I take it from what you say that your architecture does not allocate fixed bandwidth resources to a wiki -- which we then can strain with lots of users doing work on the same "set" of pages.

Please tell us or publish a FAQ about the way the Edit Lock works and the potential problems multiple immediate switches of edit focus might cause (especially for impatient kids!)

The lab network is pretty simple: just 24 computers going through a switch on a 100gig network. I noticed a growing slowdown during the 45 minutes we were using the pages. That's what caught my attention. The slowest response was at the end when I clicked the "link" button in the new editor. I never got a response after watch the progress bar barely budge. Students were trying to Save or go to the FrontPage and seeing slow response. Maybe the switch was freaking out.

I'll ask our network person if there's a some intervening resource in the DOE network "proxy server?" that reacts to loads from minute to minute. There should not have been a flood of end users coming on the local network resources at that time. However, Hawaii as a state has backbone issues from time to time, as we depend on a few undersea cables whose bandwidth has to get switched out.

Again, thanks for such quick replies.
Jonathan

when I have problems like this I usually goto the source which would be your DOE to see if the can locate the problem. usually when their is a lot of computers using one source it can cause a lot of problems.

I also need to know how to avoid the error, "So-and-so" is editing the _____page, ... do you want to teal lock from this user?" (or words to that effect)

I would need to know errors what it really says?

Dmonte,
Are you asking me what the error said on my students' screens or asking pbWiki what the error means? Because the wiki is for collaboration I have to understand what (exactly) causes this.

The error is in red letters at the top of the window but under the tools display. I can't recreate the error by myself, but it seemed -- as I moved from workstation to workstation -- that when one student clicked "Edit Page" then no other student could do the same across the room. This caused issues for a few reasons:
1. Some pages are going to have to be edited a bunch of times during one session in the lab with 20+ students. An example in our wiki is the links page where all the student names offer links to their pages. Other wikis are likely to have these heavy-traffic nodes.

This group work scenario probably only arises at elementary or middle schools where computer use is more regimented.

The DOE's network office deals with the whole state (Hawaii is all ONE school district.) but there's a couple of people on our campus who might have some insight. The interesting characteristic of what happened is that it slowed down *during* the session. What changed? Likely I'll never know.

Jonathan

About the edit page error, this is normal behaviour for a check-in/check-out designed system. It is there so that when two or more users edit one page at the same time, one user doesn't overwrite someone else's changes.

The cause of performance degradation is likely caused by one or a combination of things:

1. Pbwiki server load/connection to the internet (which I think is highly unlikely)
2. Your school's connection to the internet
2. An external factor outside of pbwiki/your school, which include Hawaii's internet backbone ... or somewhere along that path.