I've tried many suggestions from this forum to try to improve the performance of my moodle 2.1 installation, but it is still extremely slow. Everything works and I don't get any errors, but literally every single request made by pluginfile.php takes well over 3 seconds when the file is not in my cache. Regardless whether a file is under 1K or 200K, or any other size, it always takes at the very least 3 seconds. Other non-moodle websites that I have running on the same server have response times of only a few milliseconds for such small files.
Surfing the moodle website is actually OK (a little slow, but acceptable), but taking courses is almost unbearable. I am using a windows server 2003 with decent hardware and I am hitting moodle with only 1 user! Can someone please tell me if this is normal due to the way moodle 2 stores files in the database? What are some of your pluginfile.php response times? (I am seeing my times with firebug extension for firefox). Also, if you have fast response times for your database files, could you please tell me how you did it?
Some of my important settings are pasted below. Please note that everything is working ok without errors. All requests come back as 200 OK, but they are just super slow. I am using MSSQL and windows, and changing to Unix and Postgre is not an option... Thanks in advance for your time and help.
Moodle 2.1 (Build: 20110701)
Extra PHP memory limit 1024M
Zend Extension 220090626
PHP Version 5.3.6 non-thread safe
Architecture x86
IIS 6 with CGI/FastCGI
MSSQL 2005 with FreeTDS
DBType mssql_n
dbpersist = true
Session Support enabled
session.cache_expire 180
Some PHP ini settings:
realpath_cache_size = 200K
realpath_cache_ttl=200
memory_limit = 512M
log_errors = Off
track_errors = Off
html_errors = Off
extension=php_dblib.dll
odbc.allow_persistent = On
mssql.allow_persistent = On
wincache-1.1.0-5.3-nts-vc9-x86
Windows Server 2003R2 Standard Edition Svc Pack 2
Dual-Core AMD Opteron
Processor 1212HE
2.01 GHz 2GB Ram
The server is dedicated, not virtual, and has an extremely fast connection.