Hi Guys & Gals,
I am very new to moodle. I installed moodle 2.7. It seems to work but it is very slow in loading etc. Can anyone help point me in the right direction?
thanks
john
I'm in the same boat. I have a default Moodle 2.7 installation on a shared host, but it's an above-average hosting plan - I have a Joomla site on the same plan that runs very fast. I have yet to build any Moodle course, only added two basic pages such as 'about us' and it's taking 10 seconds or more to load a page. Same for the administration pages.
Following Tim's recommendation, I'm reading the Performance Recommendations and it's full of highly technical language of what hardware to use, how to tune an operating system, web server, PHP, HTTP, SQL. There is very little about Moodle itself. It's like a car is going very slow and the manual is telling to build faster roads or drive only on autobahn.
My goal is to develop a small trial site, and if all works well, gradually scale up to make a bigger site on a dedicated host. If Moodle is NOT designed to run on a shared server then it should be noted clearly in documentation so that users don't waste time trying to install on shared hosts. However, if it is possible to run a lighter version of Moodle, it would be great to have a list of recommendations on how to improve it's performance WITHIN Moodle. For example, the list of default modules with a measure of resource usage so that a developer can make a decision which modules to disable initially to develop the site with limited resources.
Thanks.
Art
Firstly, you are digging up an old post which may not be relevant. However...
Think about what you are saying here - "I don't understand the performance recommendations so I'm just going to blame Moodle"
Moodle is a big application - it just is because it does a lot of stuff. So you need a certain amount of resource to do so. However, to say it does not run on shared hosting is simply not true. There are thousands of sites running happily on shared hosting.
In general Moodle scales very easily simply by adding resources (read hardware) but if you don't have enough hardware for your use of Moodle or it is badly configured then a slow site is what you will get. This isn't Moodle's fault.
I've said it before and I'll say it again - if you are going to run a production Moodle site (or any server based web application) you have to take a bit of responsibility for knowing what you are doing. You do need to understand a bit about performance, security, backups, mail, DNS and so on or you will run into difficulties.
Having said all that, we are very much here to help so a full description of your configuration, what problems you have, and what you have done (if anything) to diagnose them is welcome.
Just a thought...
Start by going to Site administration > Plugins > Caching > Test performance.
Just take the default number of test requests and tell us what the File Cache numbers are. I suspect it will be very poor (due to super slow disk IO on your hosting)
Howard, I never saw this test before, so I ran it on my VPS. I am wondering how to interpret the results. Are they good? I appreciate your feedback.
| File cache | Tested | 0.0197 | 0.0044 | 0.0011 | 0.0029 |
It gives a very unscientific view of your disk IO speed which is absolutely critical if you are caching to disk (the default). It's all relative, but your figures are indicative of local disks which is what you need. If you encounter a system where the disk is not local (say NFS or some VMs with bad disk configs) then these numbers can be many orders of magnitude bigger. That will kill the site. There are several solutions but it comes down to using faster disk or get an external cache (memcache / memcached)
Okay. Thanks.
These figures are for my VPS, so I am not sure if the figures are really accurate, or if they are small because the VPS disks are also virtualized.
That's the point - it doesn't matter. It's how long Moodle is taking to write to what purports to be disk. In your case it is (reasonably) fast. On some VMs the disk is virtualised on a file on another machine in the next town so it would appear and those numbers will be many times bigger. And you would know about it because page load times would be in the realms of several seconds.
Thanks again.
My page load times are around 1 second, maybe plus or minus .2 seconds. I am very pleased with this. I do have opcache running, too.