I'm running Moodle 1.9.10+ on a Windows 2003 server with IIS 6, PHP 5.3.3 NTS under FastCGI and a MSSQL 2005 database. 10000 registered users and 155 courses. Initially we were using eAccelerator and then switched to WinCache from Microsoft.
Both performed really well, but we eventually stayed with WinCache.
I'm still testing it on Moodle 2.
UPDATE: We've been running Moodle 2 in production for several months now and we have never had any problems that can be traced to the WinCache extension.
41000+ users
250+ courses
We're in the process of moving to a Windows 2008 High Availability Server environment and it will be interesting to see if there are any problems there...
Luis,
We've been running Moodle 2.1 in production for many months (50,000 users, around 1,400 courses) with WinCache with no problems. Beware though, the latest development version of WinCache is broken with Moodle. I posted here about it:
http://forums.iis.net/t/1183946.aspx
Thanks...
eAcelerator
Cloud server running CentOS.
It didn't work out for me. I tried to install the eAcelerator first using eaccelerator-0.9.6.1 and ran in to the well documented issues of it no longer being compatible. After version 0.9.5.3 they dropped support for the PHP commands used by Moodle (and other PHP software like Wordpress etc).
That leaves rolling back to version 0.9.5.2. During install I started to ran into problems after the 'make' command, which ended in: make: *** [optimize.lo] Error 1
I think this is due to it not being compatible with the current version of PHP 5.3.18.
I think Im going to look at APC next in the hope it has a future with moodle, where as eAcelerator steems to be taking a different route.
Jonnym
Where do all these posts come from saying eAccelerator doesnt work? We use the latest verion of Moodle 2.3.x and eAccelerator with PHP 5.4.
The latest release of eAccelerator;
25 Jul 2012 - Project moved to Github
We have 128mb allocated and have cached nearly 2000 scripts so far, seems to me its working like it should, We have noticed a huge increase in quiz performance after increasing the shared memory.
Jason, I can't answer your question. But I do take an interest in what you are saying. I am a novice at these accelerators. Could you point me to any good resource (maybe one that you used) that tells how to install eAccelerator. I would really like to give it a try and I would appreciate any help. This might get us into a whole new topic.
Thanks.
What is your host Operating System? If it is *nix then it is basically the same to configure and install.
Download the latest version from github, https://github.com/eaccelerator/eaccelerator
Make sure to install php5-dev packages
Untar the archive you downloaded,
Make sure you are root or run as sudo the below
CD to the untar'd directory, then run in order; phpize , ./configure , then lastly make.
After you run those commands the .ini file will be in /etc/php5/conf.d/eaccelerator.ini.
The documentation for eAccelerator on Moodle Docs says to run make install but you do not need to, after you run phpize, ./configure , and just make that is all you need to do.
Let me know which OS you have and I can point you into the right direction, I use Ubuntu Server 12.04 following docs are found here, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/eAccelerator , Always download the latest version from github not necessarily the version on the documentation.
Jason
Which version of Wincache are you two using which DOES work, please?
I haven't found a version of Wincache that works properly with Moodle 2 yet - have switched a couple of people to xcache which seems to be more stable.
Dan, what's wrong with WinCache - why do you say it doesn't work wioth Moodle? What problems have you experienced with it?
when Moodle deletes a directory and tries to recreate one with the same name straight away it fails - happens with backup/restore and clearing cache (which happens during upgrades as well)
it's due to this bug with wincache:
https://bugs.php.net/bug.php?id=60743
MDL-35066 also has some relevant info.
Moodle 1.9 doesn't appear to do this much so doesn't run into the same issue.
Thanks. Do you have any recommended php.ini settings for xcache?
no sorry - I haven't done much targeted perf tuning on windows boxes for around 5 years. The company I work for (Catalyst IT) predominantly supports the use of open source technologies and we don't do much with windows systems.
We do have a small number of clients that host Moodle on their own windows servers that we provide help when they're having issues (first we try to convince them to move to a linux stack for a range of reasons including performance) - I recently spent way too much time battling with wincache on one of those sites and tried a range of different PHP versions/Wincache versions/configuration to see if I could fix it as the reports I'd seen suggest wincache performed better over the other available accellerators when running IIS but in the end the only option I had was to run a different accellerator - Xcache seemed to work as a replacement (in that it installed/cached stuff/improved perf and didn't crash the server) - I have no idea whether it is faster than the other options APC/Eaccellerator etc but I'd already spent too much time looking at it and needed to go work on other stuff
Thanks. Were the problems that you had with Wincache experienced under IIS or Apache?
AFAIK Wincache was really designed for IIS - there are a couple of people who have managed to get it to work under windows/apache but I'm not really sure why you would bother when there are many other good stable/tested/proven PHP accellerators around for Apache.
I've only ever used Wincache on IIS
Dear all,
We use Windows 2008 R2/IIS7 for our Moodle site and there is a delay of 2 seconds average since you click a resource until the resource opens that we have never found out where it comes from.
One of the solutions was to install a php accelerator. I was inclinded to install Win Cache because I wrongly thought that it provided the highest performance for IIS7, so I am glad to have read your post.
Can you please confirm that Xcache is not going to crash the server before I pass the information to the IT guys?
Thank you very much for your advice
you need to install a php accellerator - which one you should choose is hard to tell except that wincache has issues with Moodle 2 - just ask your IT guys to install a php accellerator and not to use WinCache.
