Help/Admin/Environment/Machine

This page details the recommended environment for running XOWA.

Machine

For building wikis, XOWA works best on a recent-generation machine. For building English Wikipedia, XOWA works best with high-performance hardware.

As a data point, here is my current machine setup:

• Processor: Intel Core i7-4770K; 3.5 GHz with 8 MB L3 cache
• Memory: 16 GB DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
• Hard Drive: 1 TB SSD SATA III
• Internet bandwidth: 28.0 Mbps
• Operating System: openSUSE 13.2

(Note: The hardware was assembled in late 2013 for about $1,600 US dollars.)

For English Wikipedia, it takes about:

1. 4 hours to download the dumps
2. 2 hours to build the wiki
3. 70 hours to parse 11+ million pages in the wikis and
   1. identify required images
   2. generate the HTML dumps
4. 2 hours for post-processing steps

Note that most users will only need to do steps 1 and 2. Steps 3 and 4 are only for those who want to generate HTML dumps / image updates on their own.