Speeding up mediawiki

dankblog! 2026-08-21, 0104 EDT, at the danktower

i've been running the (generally mad decent) MediaWiki software from the (somewhat more dubious) Wikimedia Foundation to power this site since 2007 or so, almost twenty years at the time of this blogging. given that the software was first released in 2002, DANKWIKI has got to be one of the older continuously-operated MediaWiki installations. kinda neat. this is the third or fourth iteration of the hosting environment (a colocated 1U server of my own, then 1and1, and Linode---now part of akamai---since 2012). i wrote up some tips on running MW many years ago, most of which are probably now unnecessary or simply wrong. such is the nature of software: πάντα ῥεῖ. mostly it just handles itself: i update it manually a few times each year, and generally spend less than twelve hours total on administration per annum.

my hosting bill is $576 a year (up from $480 for most of the site's existence). this gets me four dedicated EPYC 7713 cores, 8GB RAM, 200GB SSD-backed store, and unlimited transfer peaking at 1Gbps. there are probably better deals, but Linode has treated me right in our time together, and their staff is of the first tier. back in march i wanted to enable IPv6 for my mail stack (yes, i still run my own mail server, and will do so until it's taken from my cold dead hands), and ran into predictable Spamhaus difficulties. most providers would have no idea what they were talking about, if i was even able to get someone to talk to me. Linode cut me a routed /64 free of Spamhaus history within the hour, and i'm whipping and driving ESMTP over ipv6 today (in addition to talking about half my HTTP over it):

[schwarzgerat](0) $ dig +short -t aaaa mail.qemfd.net
2600:3c02::f03c:91ff:fe93:b216
[schwarzgerat](0) $ 

it was always about maintaining an external wordhorde i could share with The People, eaten as pure OpEx. with that said, i made about $1500 back in GoogleAds revenue before disabling ads in 2019, and more importantly hundreds of kUSD from consulting directly due to this site. it furthermore gives me my primary platform for shouting into the void, one theoretically beyond the control of the hyperscalers (in truth, if google/apple/amazon/baidu/erikabadu/dairyqueen were to blacklist me, i'd be pretty fucked, but that battle was lost long ago). so i'm pretty fond of ye olde us-southeast at 56 marietta street (ATL13). it even got a shoutout in my first novel.

previously: "rescuing your chrome history" 2026-05-25