I run a wiki an order of magnitude larger than yours on a 2GB Linode. You should have no issue on a $20/mo 512MB Linode provided you're running a modern PHP stack.
My recommendation is NGINX, PHP-FPM with APC and the built-in mediawiki file cache. If you're not getting the performance you want you could also run Varnish or set up a separate Linode for memcached. You could also place the wiki behind Cloudflare if you're serving a lot of media files on page, if not I don't think it would be beneficial.
Best, Chris
On Tue, Nov 27, 2012 at 9:40 PM, Dan Fisher danfisher261@gmail.com wrote:
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 _______________________________________________ MediaWiki-l mailing list MediaWiki-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-l