Evaluating Moodle

Evaluating Moodle

by Alexis Maldonado -
Number of replies: 6
Hi everyone,

I have been monitoring Moodle progress for some time now. I am happy to say that we are currently evaluating it for use in our Institution as our main LMS. We are currently using our own extremely customized version of Prometheus hosted at blackboard. We are tired of fighting with licensing fees and other technical problems with our current LMS.

In the next few months we will be comparing features and creating themes and modules in Moodle that match our LMS. Of course it will take some time since I've been out of PHP for a long time and our main is ColdFusion. If it all works out I think we can both gain and contribute allot to Moodle smile.

background stuff about us:
we run an average of 1100 courses/sections at a time.
we have 250+ faculty
an average of 14,000 students at a time.
We keep growing exponentially.
new courses start once or twice each month.
We run Oracle for Prometheus and Postgresql for our SIS integration.

Questions:

Moodle in a web cluster possible?


I'm very exited about using moodle smile !

Average of ratings: -
In reply to Alexis Maldonado

Re: Evaluating Moodle (clustering)

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
Sure, Moodle runs on PHP under Apache, and Apache clusters nicely.

eg http://moodle.sourceforge.net is a cluster.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Evaluating Moodle (clustering)

by Greg Barnett -
Any special steps you took to make it work in a clustered environment?

Next week I'm going to be looking into some type of load balancing/clustering setup, as the single machine I'm currently running Moodle on isn't keeping up with demand.
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Greg Barnett

Re: Evaluating Moodle (clustering)

by John Gone -
Hi Greg,
What are you currently running? Have you seen this yet?
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Greg Barnett

Re: Evaluating Moodle (clustering)

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
The only thing you need to do is make sure that Moodle uses a central place to store sessions (by setting the PHP session_path to be somewhere on a shared drive). If you use /tmp this is of course different on every machine and sessions don't work.

Other than that it should Just Work ™.

(P.S. I've moved this discussion to Servers and Performance).
Average of ratings: -
In reply to Martin Dougiamas

Re: Evaluating Moodle (clustering)

by Alexis Maldonado -
Thanks for the tips..

So the ideal setup would be clustered web servers on front and the database and file servers on back.

Has anyone tried using Coda or OpenAFS to do the distributed filesystem in a cluster? If so..
Experiences?
Im currently researching Coda that has disconnected network operation while OpenAFS seems to be more robust but lacks the disconnected operation feature that Coda has (they are working on it though)..
A good quick read about network filesystems here..

http://www.lugatgt.org/articles/nfs/#toc_2_4_1
Average of ratings: -