Installing and upgrading help

No, absolutely not. You should use the latest Moodle version, because old versions of Moodle are no longer supported for security and lack features.

As a case, when we do foreign language placement testing of 200 concurrent users, with a 50 question multi-media quiz, 8mb server RAM has been sufficient.  (Note: on a LAMP server)

Wrong! The problem is in the very short answer to a long story.


The fact is that the memory usage of Moodle, like in many other software, has been continuously increasing with time. OK, there were small fluctuations, but generally upwards. Perhaps the biggest jump was during the generation change from Moodle 1 to Moodle 2.

Upto 1.9 there was this rule-of-thumb "that Moodle can support 50 concurrent users for every 1GB of RAM" https://docs.moodle.org/19/en/Installing_Moodle#Hardware. The Moodle Doc for the next version https://docs.moodle.org/20/en/Installing_Moodle#Hardware still says the same, I guess it is a lapse in the document updates. Compare that to https://docs.moodle.org/21/en/Installing_Moodle#Hardware which says, "that Moodle can support 10 to 20 concurrent users for every 1GB of RAM". Matteo is refering to these numbers to stress the fact that the rough number of concurrent users per 1 GB RAM has been decreasing from 50 (1.9), 20 (2.1) to 10 (2.9).

There is no point in talking about Moodle 2.0, 2.2, ... say 2.6, they have long being abandoned. Moodle 1.9 survived most of them, is still a running strong, see https://moodle.net/stats/, it is the Windows XP of Moodle! If you are low on RAM and expect a lot of concurrent users you might be forced to 1.9, if you don't have the skill (Windows server) or invest on Linux skills, nginx, php-fpm, etc., and be able to get the maximum out of your hardware. For an extreme example, visit https://moopi.mrverrall.co.uk, which is a Rapberry Pi. Discussion here: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=312419.

You are going to hear a big commotion asking you to go for the newest, everything else is insecure, etc. That is for the Developed World. The conditions in the developing countries are different. Just the other day we helped to pull a Moodle 1.7(!) in India to 1.9: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=313623.

Hi Ezekiel,
no, it's better to know the exact requirements , than it's up to you to play with old, bugged and no more supported versions.

You could use 2.7 but nothing older and the difference between 2.7 and 2.9 in terms of performances are negligible compared with the benefits of some new features in 2.9 - which could be valuable or not, depending on the targets of your instance.

You need to define a budget keeping in mind that "the lowest" is not a good starting point to serve 5K+ users. Start defining your desired concurrency, the required amount of disk space to host the supposed materials your teachers will add, stick with Linux as OS and follow the MooPI guidelines here about how to create a nice environment in terms of SW&Configuration - not strictly the same HW! - where hosting your Moodle instance.

HTH,
Matteo