Stephane Coillet-Matillon, 24/06/20 18:08:
We rolled-out the whole thing in a few days using
Kiwix-serve[2] - most of the time needed was for them to secure a big-ass server and grant
us root access. It’s been running smoothly ever since - up to 100,000 users/month at peak,
which was nice. Contents deployed were Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Wiktionary, Vikidia and a
couple of video channels we also serve as ZIMs.
So what did we learn?
- Kiwix-serve is super easy to install, and can manage large loads robustly;
This is excellent!
I think it's good news for digital preservation purposes, too. When a
dynamic website is retired, in the future you can "just" archive it is a
static website in HTML and serve it with a proxy. Currently this is only
possible with WARC-proxy and I'm not aware of anyone using such
technologies at scale before this.
Also, compare to the cost of running the Wikipedia Zero initiative,
which needed a lot of software configuration in MediaWiki and Wikimedia
clusters. Serving a dump is not as good as serving dynamic content, but
being able to do it independently from Wikimedia Foundation is a giant plus.
They made a simple but sweet video[3] - in French only
but you’ll get the idea.
[3]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ug0XEFhByc
Cute.
Federico