diff --git a/doc/bugs/ikiwiki_overzealously_honours_locks_when_asked_for_forms.mdwn b/doc/bugs/ikiwiki_overzealously_honours_locks_when_asked_for_forms.mdwn index 05b4a453c..1e74fe8db 100644 --- a/doc/bugs/ikiwiki_overzealously_honours_locks_when_asked_for_forms.mdwn +++ b/doc/bugs/ikiwiki_overzealously_honours_locks_when_asked_for_forms.mdwn @@ -1 +1,34 @@ When an `ikiwiki` instance is holding a lock, a web user clicking on "add comment" (for example) will have to wait for the lock to be released. However, all they are then presented with is a web form. Perhaps CGI requests that are read-only (such as generating a comment form, or perhaps certain types of edits) should ignore locks? Of course, I'd understand that the submission would need to wait for a lock. — [[Jon]] + +> Ikiwiki has what I think of as the Big Wiki Lock (remembering the "Big +> Kernel Lock"). It takes the exclusive lock before loading any state, +> to ensure that any changes to that state are made safely. +> +> A few CGI actions that don't need that info loaded do avoid taking the +> lock. +> +> In the case of showing the comment form, the comments +> plugin needs CGI session information to be loaded, so it can check if +> the user is logged in, and so it can add XSRF prevention tokens based on +> the session ID. (Actually, it might be possible to rely on +> `CGI::Session`'s own locking of the sessions file, and have a hook that +> runs with a session but before the indexdb is loaded.) +> +> But, the comment form also needs to load the indexdb, in order to call +> `check_canedit`, which matches a pagespec, which can need to look things +> up in the indexdb. (Though the pagespecs that can do that are unlikely +> to be relevant when posting a comment.) +> +> I've thought about trying to get rid of the Big Wiki Lock from time to +> time. It's difficult though; if two ikiwikis are both making changes +> to the stored state, it's hard to see a way to reconcile them. (There +> could be a daemon that all changes are fed thru using a protocol, but +> that's really complicated, and it'd almost be better to have a single +> daemon that just runs ikiwiki; a major architectural change.) +> +> One way that *almost* seems it could work is to have a entry path +> that loads everything read-only, without a lock. And then in read-only +> mode, `saveindex` would be an error to run. However, both the commenting +> code and the page edit code currently have the same entry path for +> drawing the form as is used for handling the posted form, so they would +> need to be adapted to separate that into two code paths. --[[Joey]]