Hardware and performance

I just wanted to eliminate the most obvious possibility first.

And just to say the obvious, no, Moodle should not be that slow.

The next thing to look at is what limitation you are hitting, and it will probably be either memory or CPU, and it will be caused by either the database or the web server.

Can you monitor those while trying some page loads, to see if you can work out where the problem is.

Or it may be that something is badly configured, so there is plenty of memory in the server, but something that needs lots of memory to run efficiently is not using as much as it needs.

That is all a bit vague because I don't konw much about administering Windows. I just know in principle the kind of things you need to look for.

I GOT IT TO WORK!!!!

The problem was the MSSQL FreeTDS driver. I switched it to the newer MSSQL driver version 2 (released 6/28/2010: SQLServerDriverForPHP20.EXE) for PHP and IT IS BLAZING FAST NOW!

Hopefully I can save many days of aggravation for other people trying to make Moodle 2 work with Windows Server 2003, IIS6 with FastCGI, Wincache, PHP 5.3, and MSSQL 2005. Here is what I did:

Download the driver package here:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=df4d9cc9-459c-4d75-a503-ae3fceb85860

Unzip the contents and place the file php_sqlsrv_53_nts_vc9.dll in your C:\PHP\ext folder.

Now download the MSSQL 2008 native ODBC driver (even if you have MSSQL 2005, it works) from here:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-US/library/cc296170%28v=SQL.90%29.aspx

My server is 32bit so I downloaded the x86 package. I installed only the client (default option without any extras)

Now, in your moodle/config.php make sure the database settings are:

$CFG->dbtype    = 'sqlsrv';      
$CFG->dbhost    = 'localhost';  
$CFG->dbname    = 'Moodle';     
$CFG->dbuser    = 'MOODLEDBUSERNAMEHERE';   
$CFG->dbpass    = 'YOURPASSWORDHERE';   
$CFG->prefix    = 'mdl_';       
$CFG->dboptions = array(
    'dbpersist' => true,       
    'dbsocket'  => false,
    'dbport'    => '1433',   
);

Now edit your c:\php\php.ini to have the following extension:

extension=php_sqlsrv_53_nts_vc9.dll

Make sure any other mssql drivers are commented out, such as:

;extension=php_dblib.dll

-------------------------------------

What really did it for me was a test file that prints detailed error messages. I created a test.php in the moodle root with the following code:

<?PHP
$link = sqlsrv_connect('localhost', array('UID' => 'MOODLEDBUSERNAME', 'PWD' => 'MOODLEUSERPASSWORD', 'Database'=>'Moodle'));
if($link === FALSE) {
    echo 'Could not connect:<br><br>';
    die( print_r( sqlsrv_errors(), true));
}
echo 'Successful connection';
sqlsrv_close($link);
?>

This gave me detailed error messages which helped me to fix my problem. Hopefully these tips will save a lot of time and aggravation for other Moodle Windows users.

Thanks to everybody who helped me here!

I'm glad you solved the issue! And thanks for posting back such a detailed solution.

lighttpd and ngnix are "lightweight" HTTP servers (I would recomend Cherokee, but its Windows builds have been broken for quite some time), and XCache is a PHP op-code cache (like Wincache). The point here is maybe these things will work better for you and as a side-effect, as they are multiplatform, you won't be tied to Windows.

How is breaking your PostgreSQL+Moodle test install? I mean what errors are you getting. My experience on administering Moodle is mainly on Linux, but AFAIK it should be as easy as installing and configuring PostgreSQL (getting an optimal config may take some time if you are not used to is plethora of parameters, but for testing the out of the box config is ok), checking the pgsql PHP module is installed and works, and performing the usual Moodle install. As you're doing a test installation you could try the latest RC of 9.1, which has some small improvements for Windows (like the pg_ctl one).