I was running mediawiki on a Shared host and traffic was around 10K views a
day (small to moderate size wiki). I was forced to leave that setup because
of high CPU usage. I was not able to install Squid there or do anything to
speed things up. I had talked about that before on this list and I'm
thankful for the recommendations.
Now I'm on a VPS where Squid is running and currently I don't have CPU
issues except when there's a traffic spike. So I've decided to look for a
dedicated server. I've seen on web hosting forums that (low-end?) dedicated
servers are available for pretty cheap ($100). Currently I'm paying $70 for
the VPS.
My key issue is that the webhost has to willing to let me remain anonymous
and because of this my options are limited. For example they have to accept
Paypal. I have not looked around yet at what options are available but I
will look into that next after this discussion.
To be prepared for the future, I want the server to be able to support 30K
views a day (3 times the current traffic) and display pages with no
noticeable/serious delays. I hope a $100 server with Squid can do this for
me.
Are there any server specs that I should look for? The first one would be
RAM. What's the minimum RAM I should have? Other desirable specs?
My second issue is the hit ratio for Squid: According to Squid's cache
manager, the cache hit rate is about 40% and the byte hit ratio is 20%.
Average time taken to serve a "missed" request is 0.7 seconds, while for a
hit its only 0.02 seconds (35 times faster). So a higher hit ratio would be
really nice.
Looking at Squid's access logs, I also noticed that calls to Load.php are
always "misses". Can anything be done to fix that?
What can be done to optimize Squid for mediawiki and increase the hit
ratio? The RAM I have available is 1.3GB and I told Squid it can use 130MB
and it goes over and the total RAM used usually stays around 40%. I know
1.3GB may be small. I've heard we need to leave some ram free, to ensure
system stability. I may have more RAM in the dedicated server when I get it.
If anyone has a high hit ratio, I would really be thankful if you could
email me your Squid.conf (remove any sensitive information) and I can
compare it with my setup. Or you could tell me the settings I should change
or add.
thanks!
Dan
Hi everyone,
I'm very excited to announce the release of my new book, "Working with
MediaWiki". It's a general reference guide to MediaWiki, that's meant for
anyone who runs, or is thinking of running, a MediaWiki installation. Its
23 chapters cover everything from MediaWiki syntax, to categories and
namespaces, to the various useful extensions, to customizing the skin and
interface. The extension known as Semantic MediaWiki gets special focus,
with four chapters devoted to it and its spinoff extensions. However, even
if you're not planning to use Semantic MediaWiki, this book is crammed full
of the information you need to use MediaWiki to its fullest capacity.
And MediaWiki head developer Brion Vibber was kind enough to provide a
brief, but meaningful, foreword.
This book is the product of over a year's worth of work, and contains a lot
of knowledge gained from years of helping out with MediaWiki installations
large and small through my consulting company, WikiWorks.
The publisher is WikiWorks Press; you could also refer to the book as
self-published if you want. :)
"Working with MediaWiki" is available via print-on-demand, as an e-book,
and as a PDF download, and can be found on Amazon and the like. You can
read more about the book, including ordering information, at its website:
http://workingwithmediawiki.com/
It's a good addition to any bookshelf, real or virtual, and this holiday
season it could hopefully be a great gift, for yourself or that special
MediaWiki admin in your life.
-Yaron
--
WikiWorks · MediaWiki Consulting · http://wikiworks.com
(((re-sending, hopefully it will arrive now)))
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Nov 16, 2012 at 2:13 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Research on newcomer experience - do we want
to take part?
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: mediawiki-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Hi, sorry for cross-replying.
On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 3:11 PM, Lydia Pintscher
<lydia.pintscher(a)wikimedia.de> wrote:
> On Wed, Nov 14, 2012 at 11:00 PM, Marcin Cieslak <saper(a)saper.info> wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> Kevin Carillo[1] from University of Wellington is going to research
>> "Newcomer experience and contributor behavior in FOSS communities[2]
>> So far Debian, GNOME, Gentoo, KDE, Mozilla, Ubuntu, NetBSD, OpenSUSE
>> will be taken into account, and FreeBSD recently joined[3] and
>> there is still some possibility for other large FOSS projects to join.
>>
>> I think it could fit nicely into our recent efforts directed
>> at newcomer experience after Git migration. And MediaWiki is
>> a bit different than above projects.
>>
>> Are we interested
>> to include MediaWiki in that research?
>>
>> As Kevin explains in his post he tried to avoid spamming mailing
>> lists to look for project interested, so I am doing this for him :-)
>>
>> //Saper
>
> I've worked with Kevin in preparation for his survey and later
> promotion from the KDE-side quite a bit. This is not the kind of
> research project that is of no value to the project taking part. I
> expect the results to be very useful for KDE (and likely also the
> other projects taking part).
It turns out that Sumana and me have been in touch with Kevin in the
past days after Asheesh Laroia proposed directly to include Wikimedia
in this research.
Said and done, Wikimedia is also included in the survey and you are
encouraged to invest some minutes in it:
https://limesurvey.sim.vuw.ac.nz/index.php?sid=65151
I will send a proper announcement next Monday, but in the meantime
here is an illustrative link of links:
http://kevincarillo.org/2012/11/15/survey-update-after-1-week/
--
Quim
I'm thinking of an implementation that may have 100 thousand categories. Is that possible? Is there a documented limit? Would there be a performance hit?
Thanks,
Al
Hello,
I have just ran "php update.php" to update MW from 1.19.1 to 1.20.0 and now
I go "Fatal exception of type MWException". How can I debug?
Regards,
Frederic
Hi, this is a newbie question; thanks in advance.
I'm thinking about using SMW with MW. I'll use Semantic Forms and the like to make entering the semantic data easier and then let editors enter free text for other miscellaneous sections. But, the semantic stuff is the most important and I want to make sure the semantic data section is always on a particular location on the page; say, the top. I don't want an editor to relocate the info box anywhere he wants. Is this possible?
Thanks,
Al
I'm hoping a user who has successfully installed the GraphViz extension can
help me troubleshoot this. You can reply directly to me at <
mpd2002(a)columbia.edu> if you prefer.
I've followed the install
instructions<http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GraphViz>for the
GraphViz extension and so far everything seems OK - GraphViz dot
commands work, permissions look fine - but although the page is parsing the
graphviz content, my wiki page still fails to show any graphics:
http://www.mathewdavies.com/wiki/index.php?title=Ideologi
Usually there is an error that the map file is not found on line 420 of
GraphViz.php (should be visible on the page linked above). When I look in
the referenced image directory, there's nothing, so I'm guessing that for
some reason the GraphViz extension is not sending output to the GraphViz
image directory, although I don't see anything in the configuration that
would cause problems. (I don't think write access is a problem since I've
granted access to the image directory).
Any idea what's happening? I've looked all over the web and haven't found
anything that helps me troubleshoot.
Unfortunately I'm not good enough with PHP to trace what the extension is
actually doing. Would be grateful for any suggestions.
Sincerely,
- Mathew (mpd2002(a)columbia.edu)
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Quim Gil <qgil(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 4:50 PM
Subject: Proposal: MediaWiki Groups
To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Hi, here you have a first draft about MediaWiki Groups, and implicitly
MediaWiki reps:
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Qgil/MediaWiki_groups
MediaWiki groups organize open source community activities within the
scope of specific topics and geographical areas. They extend the
capacity of the Wikimedia Foundation in events, training, promotion
and other technical activities benefiting Wikipedia, the Wikimedia
movement and the MediaWiki software.
Imagine MediaWiki Germany Group, MediaWiki Lua Group...
These groups may become a significant source of growth and wider
diversity of our community.
Please bring your ideas to the discussion page - or here. Thank you!
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
--
Quim Gil
Technical Contributor Coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
Hello,
My name is Anthony and I'm looking at possible replacement for my organization's current document management system: Foswiki.
I've looked at a number of different comparison charts and spoke to a few vendors, but have hadtrouble actually getting a good sense for what might work for us. Here are a few things that our users are looking to find, in the new system:
* Have search results return page headings or other recognizable entity title. * Be able to group or un-group search results by web/category/areas * Search results show context of search term or at least show highlighted search term in a section of the result. * Search results focus page on the results not fill the page with fluff * Search results are ranked. Not all hits should be treated equally. * Tool is easy to navigate through contents/menus to appropriate page * Adding new entries is intuitive and easy to accomplish. * Editing existing entries is intuitive and easy to accomplish. ** Provide options/support for importing existing (FOS Wiki) data.
Anyone out there who knows Mediawiki well enough to speak to the question of how it addresses the above, please let me know your thoughts.
Thank you,
-Anthony