MediaWiki Deployment

What It Is

I run the backend infrastructure and CDN setup for the Convergence Mod community wiki (130,000+ members). Whenever major mod updates drop, thousands of players flood the site at once looking for patch notes, weapon stats, and quest steps.

The Good Numbers

• 800k+ monthly visitors and 1.5M+ page views without taking down the server
• 97% cache hit ratio on Cloudflare, so origin CPU stays chill even during peak surges
• Fast page load times globally, even on media-heavy wiki articles with hundreds of embedded images
• Zero downtime during major release weekends

How It’s Set Up

MediaWiki by default likes to hammer the database on page loads unless you put a serious caching layer in front of it.

• Edge Layer: Cloudflare handles SSL, DDoS mitigation, and aggressive edge caching. Custom cache rules cache anonymous visitor requests completely while bypassing cache instantly for logged-in wiki editors.
• Reverse Proxy: NGINX running in a lightweight Proxmox LXC container handling SSL termination, compression, and internal routing.
• App Stack: Containerized MediaWiki running on Docker with PHP-FPM and OPcache tuned for quick execution.
• Database: MariaDB with optimized InnoDB buffer pools and query caching to keep lookups snappy when the cache misses.

Stuff I Learned

The biggest lesson here was understanding cache invalidation in the real world. A 97% cache hit rate sounds great on paper, but if an editor fixes a typo on a popular boss page, that update needs to show up immediately for everyone. Dialing in cache-purge webhooks, edge TTLs, and query string bypasses taught me more about real-world networking than any textbook could.