MySQL Enviornment

MySQL Enviornment

by Christopher Medina -
Number of replies: 3

Hello all,

My orginzation has been using Moodle for quite some time now.  I have inherited a disorganized, poorly managed Moodle enviornment (From what I can tell comparativly to SFSU, etc.).  We plan on upgrading our Farm to Moodle 2.0 soon and are currently in the middle of discussing our planning, etc.  Our enviornent is at a fairly decent size at the moment, and is expected to continue growing.  At the moment we have something that looks something like this:

24 Moodle servers
2   MySQL servers  

Every Moodle server is for a separate campus, and the MySQL databases are starting to grow fairly large per each campus.  Originally we had all the MySQL db's on the same server and that was causing huge performance issues.  Although I was not working for my company at this time, I believe that it could have been related to not configuring MySQL appropriately etc.

My question is this:

We have the resources (i.e. Hearty Virtualized farm, Citrix Netscaler, etc) to implement something efficient and reliable; however, I feel as if we are not using our resources to its full potential.  I mainly wanted to know if I should look into MySQL clustering when we redesign our Moodle environment.  I was personally thinking that it may be worthwhile to look into load balancing of some sort, and implement a MySQL clustered environment that was backed up and had replication enabled for reporting, etc.

What do you all think, and where would be a good source of information to look into how to do this specifically with Moodle.  Obviously MySQL's site has plenty of information on implementing MySQL clustering, etc.

Thank you for your time,

 

Christopher L. Medina

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In reply to Christopher Medina

Re: MySQL Enviornment

by Colin Fraser -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Yes, of course you should. Having said that, you are way out in advance of anything I have, but even on a smaller scale. I would suggest performance hits have to be avoided and things like load balancing and MySQL clustering are, I expect, going to speed things up. I am sure you understand that the nature of Web Technologies, the mix of server-side and client-side processing, is going to create performance issues until processors are much faster than they are right now, until volatile memory is almost unlimited, and network backbones are without bottlenecks - yeah right... Anything you can do to reduce immediate loading and processing times is going to have a real benefit for your users. I would suggest to anyone to plan everything carefully and be prepared to accomodate reality. Best bet would be to start where you are, MySQL's site, see if you can find anyone else who does it and is prepared to help you with technical advice... but why does this sound like I am trying to tell grandma how to suck eggs? Your post says you already know what needs be done, and how to implement it - go for it!!!

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In reply to Colin Fraser

Re: MySQL Enviornment

by Christopher Medina -

Colin,

I appreciate the reply.  I found the Grandma sucking eggs expression rather humerious and I hope you dont mind if I borrow that ^_^ 

Anyway, I'm glad that you concur.  I wonder if anyone on here has done something similar and would have some advice?  I beleive the people from SFSU have based on some old thread I was reading.  Maybe I should look into that.

Thank you,

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In reply to Christopher Medina

Re: MySQL Enviornment

by Colin Fraser -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Testers

Just out of curiosity, how man enrollees would you expect? The Open University is huge, and the Kangaroo Inn Area School is very small, comparitively. According to the stats page, the average site would be somewhere around 810 active users, but that obviously does not count the unregistered sites, which I expect would have a lot fewer users and would bring that average down a lot.

One of the Moodle Partners would have an advisory service, but that will incur a cost. Outside of that, I expect that everyone with a site of over 800 plus will have done something similar. You might want to ask that question in the Hardware and Performance forum..

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