Moodle performance during exam

Moodle performance during exam

by Bernat Martinez -
Number of replies: 2

Hello, 

For us a Science exam consists of several quizzes which contains several questions (mainly Cloze and formulas)

It is during the exams when Moodle more suffers , as students work quickly (more clicks per min) and all in the same places, and Moodle has to grade all of them

We are trying to design exams in order get the best performance  as we had got some problems of  massive amount of requests to the following two files

/home/benedu/public_html/mod/quiz/attempt.php 

/usr/bin/php /home/benedu/public_html/grade/report/user/index.php 

So my question is :

- Is it better to have many questions in few quizzes or few questions in many quizzes?

- Is it better to have  many cloze/formulas questions with few answer fields or few cloze/formulas questions with many answer fields?

- Is it better not to use adaptive mode?


Thanks in advance

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In reply to Bernat Martinez

Re: Moodle performance during exam

by Tim Hunt -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers

I don't know why there should be many requests for grade/report/user/index.php

In fact is is particularly odd that what you are seeing is

/usr/bin/php /home/benedu/public_html/grade/report/user/index.php

That makes it look like a script being run form the command line. I makes no sense to run an index.php file from the command-line.

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Next, which Moodle version, and how much effort have you put into tuning your servers. (https://docs.moodle.org/27/en/Performance_recommendations ). It can make a big difference.

I know people who have successfully run quizzes with a few hundred students. In load test-ing one system we run, we simulated 1,000 students taking the quiz (some essays, with auto-save set to once per minute) and that was OK. We have never had real use at that level, but when we had 50 students take a test like that at the same time, server load was around or just below 5%, which is consistent with our testing.

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I think the kind of details you mention about how the quiz is set up is likely to have only a marginal effect on performance (but I don't know of anyone who has tried to measure that to confirm.)

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In reply to Bernat Martinez

Re: Moodle performance during exam

by Jean-Michel Védrine -

Hello Bernat,

I can't speak for cloze questions, but I can give some insights for the formulas questions wink

Unfortunately the code for formulas questions is not optimized and it would be difficult to do it completely without solving MDL-30442 tracker issue first.

My idea was to first get the question type working and later to do more optimizations but unfortunately this is something still on my todo list. Maybe now that the code is quite stable I should look at this when I find some time.

At some point I studied how to cache fragments of question text with evaluated variables to avoid being forced to evaluate them again and again but I didn't find a solution.

I use a lot of formulas questions but my quizzes are only for practice so most likely there is never a lot of students submitting a quiz at exactly the same time.

Do you have several formulas questions on the same page ? According to my tests it's always better for the server load to only have one question per page.

I will let Tim and other answer more precisely to your questions about what are the best choices regarding questions / answers/ quizzes


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