Hello,
I'm new to moodle so please forgive my lack of knowledge.
I'd like to know what are the recommended load balancing algorithms for a moodle system using 3x web servers. I have googled but could not find any recommendations. We are expecting a maximum of 50-60 users at any given time. I'd also like to know what methods of session management are recommended for this kind of setup
Thanks
For what Load Balancer? This is why you cant find any, Hardware load balancers have these built in. Just point and shoot as it were. If you use Apache Balance Manager (Free) software load balancer then it comes with 3 basic balance settings
- byrequests: weighted request count balancing;
- bytraffic: weighted traffic byte count balancing;
- bybusyness: pending request balancing.
Hope that helps. I wouls recommend using your organisations load balancer, just give the network guys your 3 IPs and then make sure that they set the session afinity stuff
The load balancer is a netscaler. We are using the file based session management but we are experiencing an issue with the amount of session files grows rapidly and causes performance problems. When we delete the sessions the performance issues immediatly stop.
The short term solution is to delete these files at regular intervals, but what could be the root cause of this issue?
wanted to edit my previois post to say that the load balancer we will be using is
big-ip F5
thanks
You shouldnt have any problems from an F5 load balancer but endith my knowledge on the subject
A short term solution would be to turn this file based session management off and use moodles database sessions. Which is now enabled by default. so check this
Or, consider using memcache for sessions: MDL-31501
In reply to Tim Hunt
Re: Recommended Load Balancing algorithms for moodle
I believe that both is better ;) I am using moodle database sessions for not loosing a single session and am trying to set up memcached offloading for sessions. There must be lots of people that have done this. Come on! It cant be that hard!