I’ve been using the demo of XWiki for a few days now and we were thinking of running it from one of our work servers, as an internal knowledge base for our systems.
I wanted to ask what the limitations of the demo were? Mainly in terms of number of pages, or data before we’d be better using a full installation (on SQL Server for example).
We’re a smallish business and most of our pages will consist of text and screenshots for navigation around our systems. We’d also have one wiki for private use by 4 people and a public one for use by the business 50ish people.
It’s hard to judge the size of our wiki would be ‘finished’, but if the demo stops working well after 50 pages for example that would answer my question!
The limitation of the demo packages are mostly caused by the embedded database so if you move to a “proper” database server you should be fine in term of number of pages.
Note that SQL Server works AFAIK since I know that some users are using it but it’s not well tested and not supported but the core team. See https://dev.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Community/DatabaseSupportStrategy.
I usually run the demo installation with up to something like 200-300 pages without problems; however I only use it for developing and testing.
The demo install does not run as a service so it will not be available if e.g. someone reboots the machine it is running on, and the larger the content in the demo the more cumbersome the migration to a “proper” instance will be. Also I feel it is quite slow compared to a “real” installation no matter how many or little pages the wiki has.
I have to admit that I normally use the Debian installer to create “real” XWiki instances, which is snap if you are comfortable with Linux, but less so if you are not. The Windows setup is a bit more tedious unfortunately.
For Windows installs I usually follow:
https://www.xwiki.org/xwiki/bin/view/Documentation/AdminGuide/Installation/InstallationWAR/InstallationTomcat/
and then:
(most of the issues related to SQL Server on the latter page are no longer valid as e.g. the search is now Lucene base (actually Solr) by default, etc.)
Installing MySQL on Windows is quite easy, too, btw.
The Tomcat installer for Windows should give you the option to install it as a service, so the wiki will run without having anyone to start it manually.
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Thank you all for your responses. We’ll have a look through the articles linked and make a decision on installing in our Windows environment.
As for it being held in memory…that’s enough for us to go straight to a full installation, once we’ve finished our testing with the demo site.