User-1602494344 posted
Success!! I have been able to achieve the response times that I was looking for, without having to move off the Microsoft platform. To resolve this issue, I did the following:
1. One of the biggest impacts, reducing the load from 15 seconds down to around 6 or 7 was to enable Mediawiki caching and acceleration, as detailed in this post: http://www.charlesrcook.com/archive/2012/09/12/mediawiki-iis7-output-caching-and-friendlyshort-urls.aspx.
In short, enable the following in your Mediawiki localsettings.php file:
$wgCacheDirectory = "c:\your\path\to\cache";
$wgFileCacheDirectory = "c:\your\path\to\cache ";
$wgEnableSidebarCache = true;
$wgUseFileCache = true;
$wgShowIPinHeader = false;
$wgEnableParserCache = true;
$wgCachePages = true;
$wgMainCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
$wgMessageCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
$wgParserCacheType = CACHE_ACCEL;
$wgMemCachedServers = array();
Make sure your local IUSR and IIS_IUSR accounts have "Modify" permissions on the cache directory, or else the files and directories from Mediawiki caching engine will not be able to write to them.
2. I made some minor changes to caching in PHP using Wincache, but that hardly had any affect - enable and configure it if you wish from a PHP perspective, but don't expect a major jump. The same thing goes for MySQL query
caching - my Wiki site is relatively small, with minimum usage, so MySQL query caching wasn't a huge improvement.
3. The final nail in the coffin to bring the site up to speed was modifying the $wgDBserver setting in my Mediawiki LocalSettings.php file. It was set to "Localhost", and this post http://forums.iis.net/t/1153459.aspx/3/10 suggested
that using "Localhost" on Windows 7 onwards, and Server 2008 onwards starts getting IPv6 involved in the querying of the page. The transport layer had to resolve localhost and was doing so by negotiating between an IPv4 and an IPv6 address, which
PHP and MySQL needed to resolve before allowing the page to render. It appears that this is still not a fully supported integrated protocol, so setting $wgDBserver to the IPv4 address of "127.0.0.1" took the rendering from 6 seconds to just on 1 second
- problem solved!
Having IIS, Mediawiki, PHP and MySQL all on one Windows Server 2008 or Server 2012 does work, once the above settings are applied.
