Hey,
For the new renderer backend for the Collections Extension we've come up with a tentative architecture that we would like operations buy in on. The living document is here [1]. It's worth saying explicitly that whatever setup we use must be able to handle the greater than 150k requests a day we serve using the old setup.
Basically we're looking at having * 'render servers' run node.js * doing job management in Redis * rendering content using PhantomJS and/or Latex * storing rendered files locally on the render servers (and streaming the rendered results through MediaWiki -- this is how it's done now as well). * having a garbage collector run routinely on the render servers to cleanup old stale content
Post comments to the talk page please :)
[1 ]https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/PDF_rendering/Architecture
~Matt Walker Wikimedia Foundation Fundraising Technology Team