Our current CMS has around 1,000 active courses. There are 12,000 students who are in at least one course on the system. I have moodle installed on a linux test machine and I really like what I see, but I have some questons on scaling.
What are the largest installs of Moodle?
(courses and students)
What kind of hardware is required for the production mentioned above?
(Linux or Mac)
How is moodle when it comes to transitioning to new hardware?
(I have read a few general posts concerning this)
Anybody have large install of Moodle on Mac OS X?
(I could have XServe(s) and a XRaid available)
Thanks in advance,
Tom
Tom Boyle
Online Learning Services
Kennesaw State University
http://www.kennesaw.edu
I know a few Moodle sites with more courses and students than that.
It depends on what features you are using, and what those students are doing, but I would use a Dual Xeon with 2Gb of RAM, running Linux.
I don't know much about Xserves, but there are ways to cluster machines to get more performance if you need it. At the very least you can run your database on one, and Apache on the other.
It depends on what features you are using, and what those students are doing, but I would use a Dual Xeon with 2Gb of RAM, running Linux.
I don't know much about Xserves, but there are ways to cluster machines to get more performance if you need it. At the very least you can run your database on one, and Apache on the other.
Thanks for your quick response. I have three such machines, RHELAS and a RH virtual clustering licenses already lined up for testing. I was to use these to cluster WebCT's Vista, but the more I have learned from our original install, the less I like it. Don't get me started on that.
If there is anyone who wants to suggest cluster configurations for Moodle on linux, please do so and I will start there. Or, if I find a good perfoming cluster configuration for Moodle, I will be sure to share it.
If there is anyone who wants to suggest cluster configurations for Moodle on linux, please do so and I will start there. Or, if I find a good perfoming cluster configuration for Moodle, I will be sure to share it.
My instinct is that 3 Dual-Xeon machines running RHEL will handle the load well. I would use round-robin DNS though instead of getting bogged down in high-availability clustering.
With three machines, I would setup two as the app servers with Apache, PHP, and an opcode cache like Turck MMCache. I would setup the third for your preferred database, and I would setup ADODB to store the sessions in the database instead of the filesystem (then you don't need to worry about sticky sessions).
The clustering software from RH (I think it's prob just re-packaged heartbeat software) will come in handy if you find some additional machines to be used as database slaves. High-availability software like heartbeat will allow a smooth transition in the case of failure.
With three machines, I would setup two as the app servers with Apache, PHP, and an opcode cache like Turck MMCache. I would setup the third for your preferred database, and I would setup ADODB to store the sessions in the database instead of the filesystem (then you don't need to worry about sticky sessions).
The clustering software from RH (I think it's prob just re-packaged heartbeat software) will come in handy if you find some additional machines to be used as database slaves. High-availability software like heartbeat will allow a smooth transition in the case of failure.