On 18 October 2012 00:23, K. Peachey <p858snake(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Thu, Oct 18, 2012 at 8:25 AM, David Gerard
<dgerard(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> We live on a 4GB Linode. I don't have a full
handle on what we've got
> on it - it's accreted in an ad-hoc fashion with some horrible bodges -
> but there's several MediaWikis, only one of which (
rationalwiki.org)
> has any appreciable traffic.
Is there any specific reason in regards to the
multiple wiki setup?
(every little bit helps remember)
You mean, why do they exist? 'Cos this is where they live :-) Some are
active with communities (e.g.
http://ru.rationalwiki.org), some are
mothballed and read-only (e.g.
http://evolutionwiki.org).
In terms of the actual wiki setup - no reason whatsoever, horrible
ad-hocracy and stuff bodged into place. Directories with 777
permissions to make stuff work. (I fixed those in short order.) The
documentation is whatever notes I write down.
> There's Lucene search, which is of course
> huge in memory.
rationalwiki.org is running via libphp5, the other
> wikis are via fastcgi (for no particular reason). The wikis have a
Standardizing configurations will probably be best in
the long run,
for no other reason than standardization.
Hell yes. The first bit of calm infrastructure I wanted to do was get
rationalbeta.com (the staging site, not up right now) into actually
being an accurate copy of
rationalwiki.org.
(Before that, I'm tempted to do another admin-only wiki for
documentation, 'cos I'm used to scribbling notes to self in a
MediaWiki. But that might be overkill.)
> huge pile of extensions, e.g.
>
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Special:Version , a lot of which are
> local things.
I would really look at alot of them, and categorise
them as "Must
haves" "Nice but not needed" and possibly "Why is this even
around?",
Well, yes. I suspect we could go on an extension cleanup to some extent.
What are these "local" extensions? are their
code bases public
anywhere?
Anything by Nx, a previous sysadmin. In general, not. And I'm not sure
they were entirely brought up to 1.19 spec from the previous 1.16.
This increases my fun factor enormously, of course.
> Whenever an article hits Reddit,[1] the server
suffers under the load.
> Typically it goes into swap and thrashes itself to death. If we're
> really lucky the oom-killer comes out to play and shoots things
> randomly (usually Apache, maybe Lucene). The fun bit: sometimes it
> does this for no visible reason, just tips over into swap and promptly
> stops talking to the world (my shell session still works slowly).
PoolCounter may help a tiny bit (One of TimS's
extensions) which was
designed after the Obama incident bringing down en.wp, But there is
only so much you can do with limited resources and configuration
setups.
ooo, worth a look.
> So second thing we need to work out what our next
stage of evolution
> is (the 8GB Linode for $200/mo more? [2] or multiple servers?
Not really knowledgeable in this area but 200/month
does seem a tad
expensive, Have you looked elsewhere apart from linnode?
Trent looked into the question on behalf of the RationalWiki
Foundation (501(c)3 and all) and decent hosting was on that order. And
Linode have been very good. (We were with a cheap host a while ago and
they were so great that the hosting moved to Trent's house over his
DSL for a time.) The joys of finding funding will doubtless keep the
question near the top of his mind, however.
- d.