On 11/06/07, Jones, Eric J eric.j.jones@lmco.com wrote:

1.  What are the hardware requirements or recommendations for the
   

new version 1.10

Hardware requirements are determined, in general, by the scale of your deployment. For example, a small intranet-based wiki with ten users will do fine on a single combined application/database server; a small public wiki would do fine on a shared hosting environment, or a single dedicated server or VPS or whatever.

If you're getting to the volume of edits and hits that you're starting to see massive performance decreases, then you start thinking about adding proper object caches (memcached) into the mix, perhaps separating the database server from the application server, and adding a slave, perhaps incorporating additional front-end caches, but the precise strategies here will also vary according to whether or not reading or writing become the problem.

2.  What is the recommended OS?  Looks like it runs on LINUX and
   

Windows.

We recommend a UNIX or Linux environment because, apart from being more ideally suited to LAMP stack servers, they're typically easier to install the prerequisites on (although if you're quite happy compiling and installing PHP, for example, then this isn't really a huge argument) and some of the auxiliaries, such as OCaml and the various texvc math rendering dependencies are a little more readily available for those platforms.

On the other hand, it's entirely possible to run a successful deployment of MediaWiki using Windows-based servers; Apache is preferred over IIS, since the latter has some significant issues with CGI path info and the like; but MySQL and PHP can be installed in a straightforward fashion under Windows, and it is possible to configure SMTP to send mail and so forth, so with a bit of extra work, Windows is a viable option as a platform for MediaWiki if that's a direction you want to go in.

3.  Does anyone have an estimate to the amount of time it takes to
   

install/configure the server?

It really depends upon the performance of the box, and the skills of the person(s) setting things up; your mileage will certainly vary here.

4.  Are there known issues problems that cause any real problems?
   

Well, what do you mean? MediaWiki has bugs, and we don't deny it; the tracker (http://bugzilla.wikimedia.org) is public, and we encourage user feedback, bug reports, and feature requests, and for the most part, these will be responded to within a week, whether that's a positive response or not...most feature requests we get are quite straightforward, and a lot of our bugs are quite simple to resolve, too.

We have an ever-strengthening release process, and do our best to avoid regressions between releases, of course, and in general, security vulnerabilities are patched up very rapidly.

Our documentation is extremely poor in a lot of areas, and again this is something we can't and don't deny, but we do our best to support users who have friendly questions both on this mailing list, or in our IRC channels; there are also third parties operating, for example, the MediaWiki users forum (http://www.mwusers.com) which seem to work for other people, so on the whole, I think our support isn't too bad, considering it's free.

If the core feature set and design philosophies of MediaWiki fit your needs - and I strongly encourage you to try the software out as much as possible before rolling it out into production, because you'll invariably find things you want or things you don't - then ultimately, what you're dealing with here is a fairly well-managed project which scales from small intranet wikis to large wiki farms such as Wikipedia and Wikitravel, with a competent, dedicated (fanatical?) team behind it.

Rob Church