[Mediawiki-l] Best in class software for small wiki on VPS

[Forest ForTrees]

Hello, I run IT for a small nonprofit that just purchased a VPS to speed up our wiki. This being our first VPS, we are starting completely fresh, and are trying to find the current “best in class” software to start with. I was wondering if people could provide feedback on the software stack we are planning on using. 

First, the 30,000 foot view:

    * MediaWiki 1.18
    * PHP 5.3.3, Apache 2.0.63, and MySQL 5.0.92, and CentOS 5.7
    * APC 3.1.9 (current) with $wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
    * Varnish 3.0.2
    * Our wiki gets about 25,000 pageviews per month, mostly from people who aren’t logged in. The test wiki can be viewed here

We’re aware that Squid has classically been used my Wikimedia, but many sources seem to be saying that Varnish, having been built from the ground up as a http accelerator is faster. I also found the following statement in a slide show called “Wikimedia Operations Overview:” “Currently in development to replace squid for all caching. More efficient than squid, better able to use resources.” 

Overall, our goal is simply to choose the best software we can find to provide a good foundation for our wiki. Any feedback would be appreciated.

In terms of other settings, because our wiki is quite small (600 articles) and because we like being able to mess around in the database, we are planning on using the MySQL 4.1/5.0 UTF-8 character encoding. Frankly, we have no idea how to make that call, but the idea of the text being encoded in a human readable format does seem attractive.

Thanks in advance,
Rob