Moodle in English: Hardware requirements for 50k users and multimedia rich Flash courses

Hardware requirements for 50k users and multimedia rich Flash courses

by Natarajan M - Wednesday, September 23, 2009, 3:03 PM

Hi,

I would like to know the suggestions from Moodle experts in this community on my proposed Moodle installation for 50K users (approx. 500 concurrent users) and Flash based courses.

We planned to have one live Moodle server, one database server and one load balancing back up server. Also, we would have two separate servers for test and development purposes with Moodle and LMS on the same servers. Please note the courses will reside outside in local web servers and Moodle will launch the courses from these local servers.

The proposed software setup options are:

Windows 2003/Apache/MySQL
Windows 2008/IIS7/MySQL
Windows 2003/IIS/MSSQL

Which of the above three would be ideal? Any known issues on the above configuration for thousands of users?

For the hardware, the options are:

Web server

2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5405 - 8 cores @ 2Ghz each
2 x 146GB 15k RPM SAS drives in RAID 1 via PERC 6/i controller
8Gb Registered ECC RAM

Database server

1 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5405 - 4 cores @ 2Ghz each
3 x 146GB 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID 5 via PERC 6/i controller
8GB Registered ECC RAM

1 x Intel Xeon-Nehalem 5570-Quadcore [2.93GHz]
16 GB - DDR3, 1333 MHz
1TB SATA II, 7200 RPM, WD1002FBYS - For Moodle
300GB iSCSI* partition - For the MySQL 5 Database

Please suggest if the above hardware config is fine or need to be changed.

And, not the least, what would be the ideal internet bandwidth for Moodle if 500 concurrent users access the LMS from different locations in the country.

Any valuable suggestions, feedback thoughts are highly appreciated.

Cheers,

Nat

Re: Hardware requirements for 50k users and multimedia rich Flash courses

by François Marier - Thursday, September 24, 2009, 6:20 AM

From our experience supporting clients on Windows, we have found IIS to be much less reliable than Apache, so I would recommend choosing the Apache option.

Furthermore, I would avoid SQL Server as we have seen lots of errors on that platform (like on Oracle) due to the fact that Moodle is only thoroughly tested on its two most common configurations: MySQL and Postgres.

Another suggestion you will likely get from other forum users is to opt for a Linux-based server if you can. You will get much better performance/scalability on the same hardware.

Cheers,
Francois

Average of ratings: -

Re: Hardware requirements for 50k users and multimedia rich Flash courses

by Visvanath Ratnaweera - Thursday, October 15, 2009, 2:16 AM

Hi

> Please suggest if the above hardware config is fine or need to be changed.

Unfortunately there is no yes or no answer to this question. It all depends on too many things. Check the documentation: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance and http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance_FAQ

> We planned to have one live Moodle server, one database server and one load balancing back up server. [...] Please note the courses will reside outside in local web servers and Moodle will launch the courses from these local servers.

Could you explain your architecture in bit more detail? See for example this forum discussion "Moodle clustering" http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57202 also http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance#Scalability

>The proposed software setup options are:
>
> 1. Windows 2003/Apache/MySQL
> 2. Windows 2008/IIS7/MySQL
> 3. Windows 2003/IIS/MSSQL

May I know the reason why almost all Microsoft? A good example of the general openion of this forum could be seen in the discussion "Large scale Moodle Host Questions" http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=132847 also check http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance#Operating_System

> what would be the ideal internet bandwidth for Moodle if 500 concurrent users access the LMS from different locations in the country.

I thought that is pretty simple: If the server hat 1 GBit/s uplink, each of the 500 concurrent users has 2 MBit/s on the average.

Average of ratings: -

Hardware and performance

Hardware requirements for 50k users and multimedia rich Flash courses