In December 2010 I upgraded to the much anticipated Moodle 2.0. After all the dust settled and I realized that I lost all of my prior courses and that Moodle 2.0 has no ability to implement backed up versions I started working on rebuilding. This wouldn't have been too bad because I have only ~100 students and no more than a half-dozen active courses at any one time.... except my installation of Moodle 2.0 was running much slower than 1.9. I limped through the start of classes for the new term and just recently decided to tackle the speed issue. I have a few possible partial solutions but I would also welcome input.
I contacted bluehost.com (my webhost) and was told that now that Moodle 2.0 uses PHP 5 I should consider using "PHP5 (FastCGI)" instead of the "Standard PHP (Default)." I made the switch and noticed decreased load times. Does anyone have a recommendation on the best way to measure the difference in performance?
If you want to try it here is what you do for a bluehost account:
- login to cpanel
- scroll down to the "Software/Services" section.
- Open the "PHPConfig" tool.
- Select "PHP5 (FastCGI)"
I was told to also look at the way Moodle uses cacheing and review the "mysql_slow_queries" logs. I don't know how to work on the caching and the logs don't mean much to me.
I also decided to download "Firebug" for Firefox (http://getfirebug.com/) and the Firebug extension "Page Speed" (http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/). I haven't used Firebug much (still don' know what it can do) but PageSpeed analysis of my site makes me wonder if I should customize my theme and optimize the images. It also recommends combining the external JavaScript (which is probably way above my ability) and specify image dimensions. I am using the "Formal White" theme that is "for modern browsers" and wonder if there is a theme that is already optimized for performance that would meet my needs.
I will be demonstrating my Moodle-based site to my supervisor and know that our college is getting ready to look at new LMS contracts... I would like my site to be fast and easy for me to use (and continue to develop) so that maybe our institution will head towards Moodle. If so I will definately encourage them to go with a Moodle Host provider.
Thank you for your attention and Happy Moodling.