Hardware and performance

Dear Miller,

Thank you for your prompt and witty reply 

Basically I am a teacher, having some interest in Moodle. I do not have much knowledge about moodle as you have. After spending few years for translating moodle, I learnt few about installing a moodle and managing a site of 200 -300 users (30 - 40 Maximum concurrent users, and the site runs well on shared hostings also). 

The project will cover nearly 600 classrooms having average 30 students in each class. The authority asked me that at a time 10% will give the examination (will take part in quiz). Thus I calculated the users. As suggested by the page: http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Performance_FAQ, there may be maximum 1000 concurrent users actively requesting a server for quiz at a time.

As I mentioned clearly in my post, the project has nothing to earn, it is for the benefit of rural school students who has access to internet with the financial aid of government but do not have subject expert teachers. Hiring services of Moodle Partners is not possible at the moment. 

Thanks again for the reply.  

Amitkumar, I actually do a form of what Guillermo is suggesting on my (much) smaller moodle site.  Whenever I give an example, I let the "start time" be anywhere within a 24 hour day, and I make these exams be timed.  This minimized concurrent Enter key presses.  On my moodle, most database queries take under 2 seconds to acknowledge by moodle.

Around 3 or 4 years ago, I was running my Moodle on a hosted server (somewhat low powered), and gave a 2-hour long exam in class with around 40 students.  At the beginning of the test, I had my highest lever of concurrency (i.e., everyone was logging into Moodle at about the same time.)  This was in moodle 1.9, and yes, some students experienced a short wait, but within 3 to 4 minutes, everyone was in.

I really like using an asynchronous model for delivering my courses.  This somewhat naturally disperses concurrency.  Even this summer, I made due dates for one course be Monday and Thursday, and in the other course Tuesday and Friday.  I did this to not only balance the load on the server, but also to balance the load on the instructor, which was me!

But quite honestly, if you were to tell all 1800 student that they had to being an activity by clicking on the activity button at exactly 10:00AM, you will probably have some problems.  This is probably "Amazon-like" activity, and even Amazon would be stressed to handle this load without any budget for IT.

This is a good possibility, BUT then there is problem of quiz being leaking out to those who will be taking test/quiz later on unless Amit comes with different quiz/test for different regions/schools.