Frequent Connection Failures

Frequent Connection Failures

by Keith Nelms -
Number of replies: 2

My students and I are experiencing frequent "Failed to Connect" and "Connection Interrupted" screens when using Moodle.

Usually a Reload or Refresh will immediately produce the desired page-- sometimes you have to do it twice. This problem crops up in any use of Moodle be it my administrative activities or students working on assignments or quizzes. It shows up in a variety of physical settings (two different campuses, my home, homes of many students) and on several platforms (Windows XP with various IE6-IE7, Firefox, Mac OSX with Safari and FireFox, probably some Windows Vista).

Three or four colleagues began using Moodle about the same time I did and are using the same hosting service and configuration. So far, they have not experienced this problem. I did not experience this problem for a long time, and the problem's appearance seems to coincide with my developing an extensive set of quiz questions in the System context of Moodle (rather than in the Course context or the Course Category context).

I have contacted the hosting service's tech support and they see no immediate causes on their equipment, though they are quick to say they do not provide detailed support of Moodle. I was told that the web server and the database services run on two different computers.

The Moodle set-up is not *heavily* used (162 registered users with only 33 active this summer). Superficial observation indicates the problem is not particularly more frequent during heavy use (like in-class testing) than it is when I am the only person on-line.

Any wisdom? I am teaching two classes this summer so I do not have the luxury of taking everything off-line to do surgery. I would like to keep my question bank visible for all courses since there many questions that show up in different courses. I don't want to invest the time in migrating the questions pool around (and duplicating content) if it is not necessary.

Specifics:

  • Moodle 1.9.1 (the hosting service's install)
  • Hosting Service: goDaddy.com
  • OS: Linux (setup version 2.0)
  • php 5.x
  • Disk Usage: 500MB of allowed 150GB
  • Bandwidth usage: Peak day was 75MB/day... seemingly trivial for the account and the problem is showing up on days with negligible usages.

Thanks,

Keith Nelms


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In reply to Keith Nelms

Re: Frequent Connection Failures

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
> experiencing frequent "Failed to Connect" and "Connection Interrupted" screens

So it is definitely not "database connection failed" as discussed here? http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=125212

From the symptomps you describe, the problem is on the server side, lack of ressources of some kind. Could be the network, could be CPU, RAM, whatever. What are the specs of the VM machine on CPU and RAM? You need to monitor CPU load and RAM usage during a breakdown.

To find out Moodle experience of other godaddy customers do a search on this forum.

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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Frequent Connection Failures

by Keith Nelms -
Yes, I saw the database connection post, but the error messages I get say nothing about database (though when the hosting service tech support told me that the web server and database server were on different hardware, it occurred to me that there might be some issue in cross machine communications. Just my guess.).

Spent some time with goDaddy tech support having them watch processes... they saw nothing that indicated anything was overloaded, per se. My ability to monitor the server environment is pretty non-existent beyond that.

Saw some other goDaddy-related posts that suggest there may be some php configuration changes that might help, but nothing definite. I posted questions there as well.

One of my next steps is to back-up the question pool in the System context and delete questions there to see if that solves the problem. However, that will be disruptive and I'm hoping to find another solution.

Any thoughts will be appreciated.
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