Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Dennis Daniels -
Number of replies: 11
Hello,
I'm testing themes in 1.5. Which theme is the LEAST browser intensive? I'm looking for the fastest loading, cleanest, easiest to use.

The over-riding issue is speed... Which theme takes the least amount of power...? (Our site is barely keeping up with our 35+ users and we have a number of dial-up students who complain about pages never loading).

Please advise.

I've posted a flash movie of themes now available in cvs:
http://www.dgdaniels.thinkingdistance.org/test/

1.5 looks very exciting!

Dennis Daniels
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Dennis Daniels

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Michael Penney -
If your site is slow, I don't think a change of theme is going to help much, unless you are using a custom theme with large graphics?


In reply to Michael Penney

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Dennis Daniels -
No, no custom themes here... well, I'm testing 1.5 now and hoping that limiting the number of questions per page will help as often quizzes will not load.

I'm beginning to suspect the randomization algorithm in the random quiz is the culprit... which is a shame. I've a large db of quiz questions now and the problem of cheating has gone way down since randomizing the quizzes... That's why I was looking for a way to squeeze just that much more performance out of moodle...

Thanks!
Dennis
In reply to Dennis Daniels

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Michael Penney -
Hi Dennis, you are most likely having trouble with not enough processor or ram on the server for your user load rather than a bandwidth problem. The quiz takes a good deal of system resources as it generates the entire quiz at the start and then submits it all in the end, both of which put a big peak load on the processing power of the server. If 35 people are starting a quiz with a high number of questions at the same general time, you may need a pretty powerful server to enable that (This is not a problem unique to Moodle, colleagues inform me that Blackboard 6's assessment engine starts to choke at ~20 simultaneous accesses on some pretty powerful hardwaresad).

Limiting the number of questions total will help, but AFAIK, even with the new ability to limit the # of ? displayed per page, the still quiz loads all the questions from the db at the start time (Henrik or someone correct me if I'm wrong here).

If you can't get a more powerful server, you might try using lesson rather than quiz, as lesson does database reads/writes one ? at a time rather than all at once so the peak load on the system remains much lower. What this means is that alot more people can start a lesson at the same time without overloading the server.

Lesson in 1.5 supports clustering, which allows fine control over randomization, but it is not as easy to set up as quiz (by a long shot, we're hoping sometime in 2005 to find time or funding to make lesson work directly with quiz question categories if it can be done while preserving the incremental read/write feature).
In reply to Dennis Daniels

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Martin Dougiamas -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Moodle HQ Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers
Dennis, if you have huge quizzes, you can now break them up into pages when being displayed.  Look in the settings for each quiz for the number of questions per page.
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Michael Penney -
Hi Martin, does this represent a change in the way quiz reads and writes to the database or does it just help with reducing the amount of html the browser renders per page?
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by steven toh -

hi how do you actually set the number of  questions per page?

In reply to steven toh

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Dennis Daniels -
In 1.5 there's an option to set number of questions per page viewed in quiz.

dgd
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Dennis Daniels -
Thanks Martin for the tip!

I've been playing with 1.5 and really liking what I'm seeing there! smile

But, I've also found some of the new fixes might introduces other problems:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=20942

I'm not sure how I'm going to find the original question for my random quizzes ... the new quiz edit page breaks the quiz data sets into tens. It makes it very difficult to search for an offending question when it could be buried in any one of 82+ pages...

take a look at the flash movies I put on my 1.5 test page:
http://www.dgdaniels.thinkingdistance.org/test/

specifically: http://dgdaniels.thinkingdistance.org/test/file.php/1/moddata/forum/1/78/1_5_searching_editing_questions.swf

Loving Moodle!

Denny
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Stripped theme: which is the fastest?

by Ger Tielemans -
Is this paging also possible for forums? We had a big problem on a heavy used forum with big attachmenets. (And yes, I know: soemone must solve the threads handling first..)