[Mediawiki-l] Requirements

[Rob Church]

On 11/06/07, Jones, Eric J <eric.j.jones at 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