Hi all
I'm trying to set up a moodle for roughly 30 concurrent user (300 users in total) to access some eLearning. The eLearning modules are about 15mb each.
I was thinking of running a VPS with the following spec:
Disk space: 60gb
Bandwidth: 350gb
RAM: 2GB
CPU's: 3
Would this be powerful enough or will I need to go up a spec.
Cheers in advance.
Hi Nathan,
In my experience from several years ago, I would say, yes that's enough because its a VPS. I have tried basic shared hosting services and 20-30 concurrent users was the limit before it slowed down, particularly with multimedia quizzes. I was always advised to upgrade to a VPS. Anyway, I hope you get some more recent advice than mine.
Don
Should be OK, just a little more RAM and maybe 2 processors
Albert
Depends what your users are doing. Will the database be on the same VPS or somewhere else? What operating system are you running? You could easily be in a situation of having no more than 1G of RAM for Apache and that's probably good for between 10-20 concurrent users in newer versions of Moodle.
So, I would say it is marginal. If you are planning on running Windows it probably won't work. I would recommend a minimum of 4G RAM to be safe(r).
Also watch out for general VPS performance. Newer versions of Moodle are quite sensitive to disk subsystem performance (due to the caching provision). A very slow virtual disk will kill your site.
Hi,
The databases will be running on the same VPS so it is a concern. I will be running Ubuntu unless you suggest I run a different OS. I have not yet set it up so I can easily change the OS.
The users will be using the SCORM player to open the file, which will be a Flash file (as it is an interactive eLearning program).
Basically Moodle will only run the one course. They will not be required to upload anything. The site layout will also be basic so it doenst need to load a lot of graphics if this helps.
OK, I think I will go for a upgrade to provide a better product (and save issue of potential crashing).
I think I will go with 4GB Ram and 4 CPUS.
I gather that this sort of spec should be safe??
That should be fine, but don't forget to read Performance_recommendations and tune your server to properly use the available memory
I am running my Moodle site on a GoDaddy VPS with similar specifications, about half the student load that you are planning for. I find that I get pretty good performance with Moodle 2.6+. Most pages display in about 1 to 1.5 seconds (sometimes faster, sometimes slower) for me. Of course, being the administrator, I see slower times than students are probably seeing.
I am careful about distributing due dates among my 4 to 6 courses. For example, I do not make all assignments in all courses due on Friday night. If I did this, the load on my Moodle would be high on Friday evenings. Even for timed exams (quizzes), I give my students a window span of one day to do these.
This semester, I tweaked the mySQL settings, and am trying Opcache. I will have a chance to see how it goes.
