Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Frankie Kam -
Number of replies: 9
Picture of Plugin developers

45 days ago,
I started by journey of hosting my own Moodle site on a Web Host company. I started off with shared hosting, got turned off by the slow speeds, then upgraded to Virtual Private Server. The site just chugged along but my students complained that the site would load ever so slowly. Now, 1.5 months later, it's a different story.

I have spent countless hours and days, while others are asleep, surfing the Net feverishly for ways to optimize and to speed up my Moodle site. I've surfed to moodle.org, googled my way through, gingerly typed detailed Linux commands along the way. BTW, I love Linux now.

I've experienced hundreds of emails to and from my Web Host company, had a major server outage, times when my domain didn't load, recovered from a full harddisk due to automated & unmonitored backup files (I can't forget that one!), blank Moodle pages, loss of data, recovery and backups along the way. I survived. But TODAY, I think I've finally got it. Henry Higgens of "My Fair Lady" would say, "By George! I think (s)he's got it!!!". Anyway....here are two reasons why I am SO HAPPY TODAY.

Reason1: My Moodle site FINALLY runs with mod_deflate page compression.

So my moodle http requested pages are compressed before they are sent to the users' web browsers. Benefit: faster loading of pages, less waiting by users for their Moodle pages to load. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=165904

Reason2: My Moodle site FINALLY runs with eAccelerator (PHP caching) just fine and dandy!

Benefit: faster loading of pages, less load on the VPS processor since first-time compiled PHP code is cached to shared RAM. Subseqent web browser http requests of cached PHP code is sent direct to the user with no need to re-compile php code.  See http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=166284

My Moodle site is running FASTER now. I am safe for now, just as long as not all 20 students of mine log in at the same time inside the computer lab to my Moodle site...

Frankie Kam
http://scm.moodleace.com
Melaka, in sunny and rainy Malaysia
512Mb RAM, 512Kbps pipe, (Centos 5, Php 5.2.17) Virtual Private Server (VPS).

Now all I need is an additional 3.5Gig RAM and a 100Mbps line for my VPS. Ahh..that would be perfect.

P.S., My limited funds to upgrade my site have run dry. So if anyone else can share with me MORE concrete ways to speed up my Moodle site, I am all ears, and I will be HAPPIER STILL.  How can I optimize my MySQL? Anything else I can optimize my Linux Moodle site?

Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Frankie Kam

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Mary Cooch -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers Picture of Translators

Frankie- I can't answer your question as I am not a technical person but I just had to say whenever you post you are always so Positive and cheerful-sounding even when you have a problem- that's a personality trait- indeed a gift - that some of us would love to havesmile

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In reply to Mary Cooch

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Mary, thanks for your kind comment. Well, there were days when I went pale because my website went blank. Once the site was nuked and I had to restore everything from my backup - thank God! That's the learning curve for you. And lately, I've been almost fearlessly trying new Lunixy stuff like installing Munin graphing facilities on my Moodle site. I've just only learnt how convenient Putty is when doing copy and paste of Linux verbose commands...

Fearless or foolhardy to work on my Production Site? Well at least I've done a 9-gigabyte full container backup of my VPS - just in case, you never know.

And the latest is I've just managed - again after half a day of surfing to many sites - to get the Munin monitoring graphs working. Thanks to this webpage entitled "Install Munin On Plesk Dedicated Server".  What do the graphs mean? I have absolutely no idea at this time. But they were look pretty and colourful to me. big grin  Source: http://www.supportfacility.com/blog/install/install-munin-on-plesk-dedicated-server

I think within a couple of days and a week or two, the graphs will fill up with more statistical data. "Look! It's moving. It's alive. It's alive... It's alive, it's moving..." (Dr. Henry Frankensteinsmile

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In reply to Frankie Kam

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Dale Davies -

HI Frankie, I've not tried it out yet with Moodle, but mod_pagespeed looks like it could improve performance of your site considerably...

http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/

I've been meaning to give it a go for a while now.

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In reply to Dale Davies

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Thanks fior the headsup Dale. I'm onto it.

""Come, Watson, come! The game is afoot. Not a word! Into your clothes and come!"" (The Adventure of the Abbey Grange)

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In reply to Frankie Kam

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Just came back from the rabbit hole...I'm afraid to use it because it might break my site's code. I'll wait for a while for it to mature first. Heh.

I did come across this excellent site that ranks your website's performance:
http://www.webpagetest.org/

My site: http://scm.moodleace.com returned a rank of 74 over 100. Nothing that great, but I am sure that's an improvement over what it was previously. Google.com returned a rank of 94/100 with six As.

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In reply to Frankie Kam

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Here's my latest Moodle site's rank. A "lowly" 76/100. Great! This means that there are lots more tweaking that I can do to improve its speed.

How does your website fare on http://www.webpagetest.org?

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In reply to Frankie Kam

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Dale Davies -

I mostly use gtmetrix.com for performance testing as it allows you to test both against the Yahoo Yslow rules but also Google's PageSpeed.  I prefer the way in which it displays the reports and saves your tests so you can go back and compare to previous results.

I managed to get 89% for Yslow smile

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In reply to Dale Davies

Re: Why I am so HAPPY today..make me happier?

by Frankie Kam -
Picture of Plugin developers

Dale

Thank you for sharing this wonderful site analyser. I am now simply obsessed with getting a perfect, or a no-so-perfect Grade score for my site. Here's what I've managed to do so far:

Howver, I'm still trying to solve my total lack of "Add Expires headers". I've posted a desparate query on http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=167051.
Dale, from the image that you posted, I notice that you managed to solve this, please share with me the secret or trick.

Thanks
Frankie Kam

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