Hello, I am part of an school system of about 10,000 students and 700 teachers. In the near future we could have up to 600 students logging into Moodle and/or downloading from Moodle at the same time. > We are running Moodle 2.1 on the following server:
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> Dell Power Edge R710 with 8 CPUs (2 Quad Core), 8 gig of memory and 200 gig of hard disk.
The rule of thumb for 1.9 was 20 MB per user ("Moodle can support 50 concurrent users for every 1GB of RAM"
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Install#Hardware). That comes to 400 concurrent users. The memory usage has increased in 2.0 and further in 2.1. Therefore 600 concurrent users are too high.
Don't forget, we are talking about free RAM for the new processes. Whether the system software (OS, web server, database server, ...) is happy with a couple of hundred MB or just flush GB of RAM down the drain makes a difference.
And what the users actually do is also important. Whether they request a simple HTML page or an online quiz makes a huge difference. Did you go through the initial pointers in the introduction to this forum?
> We are currently having performance issues (slow login and downloads) with about 100 students logging in and/or downloading at the same time.
With the same machine? That doesn't sound promising. How is this login configured, external? internal? what method? What do you mean by "downloads", PDF? audio? video? how big? total bandwidth? available bandwidth?
> Do you think this is a server issue or something else?
What people think won't help you, they may come up with hundreds of possibilities. In a situation like this you have to a) continuously monitor all system parameters
http://docs.moodle.org/en/System_Monitoring_and_Server_Statistic_Software b) debug
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Debugging.
If you want others to go into details you must provide details of your setup. See the introduction to this forum for a list of useful data.
