Upload speed requirement

Upload speed requirement

by Johannes Solymosi -
Number of replies: 7

Hi folks,

this will probably be an old question for you but I wasn't able to figure it out for myself through searching, sorry.

Apart from all server requirements, what upload speed is requirement for a school of some 400 students to run Moodle on our own servers.

I need to know if it is at all within our grasp to do this ourselves.

Thanks for your help!

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In reply to Johannes Solymosi

Re: Upload speed requirement

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
I have no idea what you mean? Please explain what you mean by "upload speed"?
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Upload speed requirement

by Johannes Solymosi -

Sorry Howard.

From what I could gather, the usual bottleneck for many schools who run Moodle on their servers on site is the actual upload speed of their internet connection. If students require Moodle from home, they would request certain files that the school server has to upload in order to become available to them. Am I right? I guess that's what I mean, hopefully it makes sense now.

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In reply to Johannes Solymosi

Odp: Re: Upload speed requirement

by Bartosz Cisek -
There is no one good answer. As usual, it depends. This time it depends on kind of content you provide via Moodle, (audio or video, graphics, presentations) and number of concurrent users.

You have to remember that upload speed may differ from download speed for instance if you have ADSL connection.

Unless you don't have choice, I advice you to get a dedicated server and don't waste your time on providing internet connection, air condition, power supply and so on.
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In reply to Johannes Solymosi

Re: Upload speed requirement

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Upload or download depends on your perspective and where you are standing at the time of course wink Most people talk about 'bandwidth'.

It's a fairly simple calculation IF you know the maximum number of people who will be connected at the same time and what size of files they will be uploading/downloading.

The first question I would ask is how is your school connected to the internet? Unless you have a relatively expensive synchronous connection it may not be viable. Most domestic and basic commercial internet connections are expressly designed to *stop* you running a server (they are fast towards you but very slow the other way).

I would probably be much cheaper to pay for high quality Moodle hosting (with, e.g., a Moodle Partner) than it would be to pay for a fast synchronous line.
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Upload speed requirement

by Johannes Solymosi -

Haha, I am hereby officially integrating 'bandwidth' into my tech vocabulary, thanks Howard. approve

I would love to pass the headache on to a Moodle Partner, but will do the maths first.

Would you know if there are stats somewhere about how much bandwidth the average Moodle user needs on an average Moodle site? Might be too simplistic, but with millions of Moodle sites and users, an average would be quite precise, wouldn't it?

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In reply to Johannes Solymosi

Re: Upload speed requirement

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
I have no idea what an "average" user might look like. I would say that you need to consider (or tell us) the following

* How will your server be attached to the Internet (dsl, adsl, sdsl, leased line, something else) and what is the quoted speed(s) of that line?
* How many users do you have, how much and how often do you anticipate they will "work at home"?
* What sort of material will they need to access. Are your courses all uploaded Word documents? Is there are a lot of multimedia?

If this looks like an issue you should be starting to think about minimising your course "sizes". Use the built-in resources rather than uploading Word/PDF/PPs, take steps to reduce the size of files you do have to upload (ask Google), etc....
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In reply to Johannes Solymosi

Re: Upload speed requirement

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
> I am hereby officially integrating 'bandwidth' into my tech vocabulary, ...

It was easy for us to remember, we associated the term with the hip party of our instructor. smile

> how much bandwidth the average Moodle user needs on an average

I don't think this is Moodle-specific. If the user has a 1 MBit/s line, he is used to that speed and expects the same from the Moodle server.

So you can reverse the question: If the server has a 100 MBit/s upload speed, it can serve 100 users, each consuming 1 MBit/s download - provided 'fcourse that the machine itself can deliver that much!
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