On Tue, Apr 13, 2010 at 11:23 AM, Branden Visser <branden(a)uwindsor.ca> wrote:
We're considering hosting MediaWiki for an
institution of approximately
16,000 users. We're wondering what costs (monetary or employee-hours)
others have experienced in a similar deployment.
Currently we're looking at a relatively light single-use (say, 50
concurrent users peak), but are considering a more enterprise deployment
in the future that could host documentation for more projects and see
more activity.
Any additional advice or lessons learned about similar deployments is
also very welcome.
Since MediaWiki is designed for concurrent use by hundreds of
*millions* of people, it should have no problem handling an internal
wiki of any size. If you don't install any poorly-written extensions
or enable any crazy options or have multi-megabyte pages or whatever,
It should scale fine to your workloads if you just throw it on a spare
machine with commodity hardware that's not too busy. Probably best to
pick a machine that has decent CPUs.
As for administration, if you have LAMP or equivalent installed
somewhere, it should take a few minutes to do a basic setup (from a
technical perspective, not counting any organizational procedures you
might need to go through). If you want to adjust its behavior a lot,
of course, you can spend unlimited amounts of time adjusting and
hacking it. MediaWiki is targeted primarily at public wikis like
Wikipedia, not corporate intranets, so you might find you want to
change a lot of things, I don't know.
Anyway, this list is used mainly by MediaWiki developers and Wikimedia
sysadmins, not third-party/corporate users. You could try asking at
the
mwusers.com forum, or some place like that, for an answer from
someone who's actually in a similar situation to you.