Moodle in English: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Adrian Beck - Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 4:21 PM

Hello

I'm thinking of installing Moodle for a school in switzerland. There, 500 students are waiting to use it(but not all at the same time!). What hardware will i need that those students can work, for example how much ram, disk space and processor performance will i need?

And which operating system would you recommend?

Thanks for your help

Adrian

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Don Hinkelman - Tuesday, September 9, 2008, 9:29 PM

Hi Adrian,

I recommend Linux because it very fast and the lowest cost to install. At our school, the engineers like Linux and can handle LAMP setup. We have 2000 enrolled students, and up to 250 students use our Moodle 1.9 site at the same time. A single Dell SC1420 server with 4GB ram, two 2.8 ghz processors, and two 500gb hard disks is more than sufficient for these needs (all are over 3 years old, so you will get this kind of hardware now very cheaply--under US$1500).

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Tuesday, September 16, 2008, 5:14 PM

Not the total number of users but the peak usage is the deciding factor. Since it is a school of 500 students, we can assume 30 Students, a whole class going online, as the peak load.

At the current recommendation of 40 MB per process, 1.2 GB is required. So any currenct server with a 2 GHz (single) processor, 2 GB RAM should be sufficient.

At this low demand the "speed" of the operating system is irrelevant. You can take anything: *BSD, Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, Windows, any other Unix.

Diskspace requirement of the system is minimal. Moodle source is 50-100 MB. A (decent) OS might need 1 GB, and another GB for temporary files, logs, etc. You'll have almost the whole thing for user data.

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Ted Celestin - Thursday, February 9, 2012, 4:54 AM

Hi was wondering which database u'd recommend for large scale moodle deployements.

Can mysql support 400000 total users and 10000 concurrent users?

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Thursday, February 9, 2012, 3:45 PM

Hi Ted

> was wondering which database u'd recommend for large scale moodle deployements.

What is the recommended language for writing great poetry?

> Can mysql support 400000 total users and 10000 concurrent users?

Each language has its mammoth works.

Having said that, we too have advocates of many of those "languages". Try the "'Using Moodle' advanced search facility" linked to the introduction to this forum to find them.

Here is a very recent example: "Re: Quiz - MySQL settings" http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=195448&parent=852388.

And a typical case, "New installation: 40000 users" http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=186985.

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Ted Celestin - Thursday, February 9, 2012, 11:11 PM

Thank you Visvanath for the links

also would apreciate it if u could give me some advice about system architecture for this kind of deployement.

i've been reading a lot about replication in mysql but when i tested it i realize that data can easy be corrupted.

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Andrew Nicols - Friday, February 10, 2012, 12:27 AM

Hi Ted,

Personally, I'd avoid MySQL like the plague - You say that data can be easily corrupted using MySQL replication, but in reality MySQL itself isn't great with your data - it doesn't offer full ACID compliance for starters.

For scenarios such as yours, I would personally use Postgresql. If replication is required, then I'd use the streaming replication that appeared in Postgres 9.0
Additionally, I'd also use a connection pooler - pgpool II and pgbouncer are the main ones.

When it comes to System Architecture, there are many options and it completely depends on your budget, experience, existing kit, etc. My former colleague Dan put together a presentation for a previous Moodle Moot entitled 'Moodle for 1000 schools' which details some of the issues we hit and the ways we addressed them. It's available on slideshare at http://www.slideshare.net/poltawski/moodle-moot-uk-07-presentation. At the time we were using multi-master MySQL replication, but moved away from that as soon as possible. I also gave a presentation at MaharaUK 2011 on this subject but for Mahara. It should still be relevant though - http://www.slideshare.net/andrewnicols/mahara-uk-2011-building-mahara-for-multiple-institutions-8410961

As a side note, it's generally better and more appreciated if you start a new thread rather than start a tangent on a very old thread (3.5 years since the last post).

Andrew

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Ted Celestin - Friday, February 10, 2012, 1:25 AM

Thank you Andrew

your advice really helps.

have experience using mysql and postgressql but it's my first time implementing moodle at such large scale .

will start new thread.

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Ted Celestin - Sunday, February 19, 2012, 4:51 AM

hello Andrew

do you think Postgres and rubyrep would be a good idea for large scale moodle deployement?

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Marcus Green - Sunday, February 19, 2012, 7:20 AM

I was under the impression that MySQL with Innodb was ACID compliant, is this not so? Have you been able to install Moodle on a database where foreign keys are created in the database?

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Ramil Valitov - Sunday, February 19, 2012, 2:19 PM

Talking about MySQL: there is the Community Server and the MySQL Cluster. Probably the type of software also comes into question when using MySQL DB.

Re: System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Tuesday, February 21, 2012, 3:50 AM

and one hears of such gigantic things like these http://developers.slashdot.org/story/12/02/16/1832237/oracle-claims-dramatic-mysql-performance-improvements.

Hardware and performance

System Requirements: Moodle for 500 Students