Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

by Chris Ekin -
Number of replies: 5

Hello,

we have a school with 200000 students and about 600 courses, 250 teachers.

I am planing to run a cluster moodle installation with 3 web nodes, two loadbalancers HAProxy and two database servers.

Here are the technical specs of each server:

1- web server (node 1, node 2 and node 3).

Each server is a HP Proliant and has:

     * 4 core

    * 32 GB Memory Ram

    * 60 GB Hard drive just for web files not database records.


2- loadbalancer has each

   * 2 core

   * 4 GB Memory Ram


3- Database server has each

  * 8 core

  * 16 GB Memory Ram

  * 17 TB storage capacity

  * Percona extradb cluster configured.


In  your experience with moodle and concurrent users performance, do you think the listed hardware should be enough to handle the above population of users ?

















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In reply to Chris Ekin

Re: Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

by Usman Asar -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Chris,

database doesn't takes that much space as moodledata does, as all files (images, documents, pdf's, audio and video etc) are uploaded to moodledata folder that forms part of webserver, whilst database server will hardly reach 20-30GB in years of time for its just textual information, so you'd better be allocating more space to your webserver rather your database servers.


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In reply to Usman Asar

Re: Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

by Chris Ekin -

Thanks Asar for your inputs... I appreciated it.

The reason we have that much storage capacity is simply because of the fact that the percona database cluster will serve tons of different applications within the datacenter.

But as you mentioned 20-30 GB should be enough for a moodle server. That is good because each web node has 60 GB of hard drive and can be reconfigured to work both as web and db server.

But don't you have any remarks or advise about the hardware versus the school population of 200000 students ?

Do you think it can handle the heat ?

The reason I am asking that question is just because I read somewhere that moodle is very thirsty in CPU usage and the logic requires to allocate at least 1 GB of ram per 10 or 20 concurrent users...

That makes me asking myself if 32 GB of ram on 3 web nodes could be enough to serve at least 42000 concurrent users that are doing :

1- Quiz

2- Reading courses and teachers notes

3- Engaging in various online classroom...

That makes me question moodle performance..


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In reply to Chris Ekin

Re: Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

by Usman Asar -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Chris, I have absolutely no doubts in hardware handling this much of traffic without coughing, as you mentioned 42000 concurrent, here I assume 42000 users logged in at same time, so concurrent actually means how many of those CLICK at the same time, which of course wont be 42000 clicks in any given instance. You are running 3 load balanced nodes each with 32 GB RAM, so each server can easy handle 600-700 concurrent users (means clicks at any given instance) so all together 2100 is a LOT.

One thing you want to make sure, where you mentioned database servers, make sure you are putting SSD Drives on your databases, as its DB servers that takes most of punishment in any modern web application, and where IOPS are crucial, I always recommend SSD, just to give example an IDE drive 7200 RPM on RAID-1 gives IOPS of 240-260, whilst on same RAID configuration, a SSD gives out 30000-60000 (depending upon drive type and manufacturer), and where databases are just text files and hardly takes on too much space, it makes sense using SSD's, or even of you want to keep them on one server (web + database), then separate the drives for database within the server. 

Finally, its always down to finding a sweet spot in HARDWARE, and then optimizing the software running on it. Ideally wait for sometime for more inputs from forum members (specifically Tim Hunt and Howard) as Tim is maintaining OU's web servers (8 web servers with 2 database servers in Master-Slave configuration) and OU can take on 50,000 users in a day.

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In reply to Usman Asar

Re: Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

by Chris Ekin -

Hello Asar,

thank you so much for your detailed explanation...

We mostly use SSD on our servers for optimum I/O performance.

I would be very pleased to learn from Tim's experience with OU web and database servers.

An infrastructure and a configuration that can handle that much users in a day for our case would be the ideal solution...


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In reply to Chris Ekin

Re: Deploying Moodle on HP Proliant Server

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

Actually, I am not much responsible for the hosting side of the OU Moodle site. I am mainly a developer, and only occasionally do other stuff when other people are on holiday at key moments.

But, that does not stop me talking about this. I gave a presentation at the 2014 Leipzig MoodleMoot, then repeated it at iMoot 2014. For some reason, that is one of the few 2014 videos they have not published on YouTube yet, which means the only place you can see a recording is http://2014.imoot.org/course/view.php?id=37, which is only accessible if you registered for iMoot 2014. I just put the slides of SlideShare http://www.slideshare.net/tjh1000/ou-moodle-hosting. There are a few things that are out-of-date after a year (e.g. we now have lots of Behat tests) but it is not too badly out of date. It would be better with what I said, rather than just the slides.

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