While writing pepperminty wiki, I started seeing a rather nasty in crease in page load times. After looking into it, I drew the conclusion that it must have been the file system that caused the problem. At the time, I had multiple calls to PHP's glob function to find all the wiki pages in the current directory, and I was checking to see if the wiki page existed before reading it into memory.

The solution: A page index. To cut down on the number of reads from the file system, I created a json file that containedd inforamtion about every page on the wiki. This way, it only needs to check the existence of and read in a single file before it can start rendering any one page. If the page index doesn't exist, it is automatically rebuilt with the glob function to find all the wiki pages in the current directory.

In short: to increase the performance of your PHP application, try to reduce the number of reads (and writes!) to the file system to an absolute minimum.

I still need to update the code to allow users to delete pages via the GUI though, because at present you have to have access to the server files to delete a page and then remove it from the page index manually.