I am trying to display LateX equations on a locally installed Mediawiki. I am trying to use SimpleMathJax extension instead of Math extension, since the former is used by sites like shoutwiki and seems quite easy to install and configure.
Following the instructions from the mediawiki page. It seems to work, except that I have some pages with a big number (500+) of equations and the render process becomes unstable: the page itself is quickly displayed but it does not render the equations. By manually refreshing the page, sometimes (maybe 20%) it does, and it takes around 10 seconds to display the equations: the text is shown on the page first, then the equations appear after around 10 seconds.
Now I am thinking of installing of MathJax on the server, but according to mediawiki, MathJax is pretty heavy.
My question is how heavy is MathJax? To display LaTeX equations is quite important for the purpose of my wiki page so I don't care if it consumes some resource, but is it affordable for a XEON E3 LGA 1150?
P.S.
In fact, I have also tried Math extension. In this case, to use the Mathoid mode as recommended by mediawiki, it seems I will have to run my own Mathoid server, since it seems external RESTbase is very slow to render my pages.
Best Answer
I'm the one of the authors of SimpleMathJax.
"Heavy" means MathJax has many resources including styles, scripts and fonts(!). So, I recommended using CDN. But MathJax is much faster now. ( Actually, "MathJax is pretty heavy" was removed on the page https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:SimpleMathJax . )
Which version do you use? If you use latest version, the performance can be improved. The latest version of SimplexMathJax is 0.7.3. It includes MathJax 2.7.3 (latest stable).