For the usual questions here on dimensioning servers, performance and scalability we can't give specific answers simply because the "speed" is something very individual.
I would like to ask our developers whether a "benchmarking suite" for Moodle makes sense. Here are some sketchy thoughts:
Szenario A
- a client driven skript where you can configure the "load". There is some correlation between this "load" and say the number of simultanous users in a real situation.
- to simulate "very heavy" loads 'fcourse one can add more clients.
- if it to simulate Moodle at work, the initial content of the installation must be defined
Szenatio B
- we use the standard benchmarks for the underlying components, like: web-server, database and PHP.
- through experience find out which set of figures are sufficient to service a certain number of simultanous users.
What do you think? Is anything like this is already available? Or is it just a crazy idea?
I do scenario A for a living. Depending on how much money you want to spend, there are some great tools available. Where I work, we use Segue SilkPerformer as the driver, and a combination of Segue monitoring, Windows PerfMon, and some home-grown code for Linux, much of which I've personally written.
There are starting to be decent open source tools available, though. I've found that even with an excellent script capture tool like SilkPerformer, there's quite a bit of custom programming required on the driver side. So don't be afraid to use an open source driver tool if you understand the programming language it's based on.
As I mentioned (almost a dozen times in the last day or so ;) I'm building a Moodle-based community site for this, and one of the courses I want to put up is on open source load testing tools. Come on by http://linuxcapacityplanning.com
I don't have much faith in scenario B. There are good benchmarks available for processors, I/O subsystems and databases, but my experience has been that most performance problems are design issues in the application, not something in the underlying platform.
In the end, it becomes an economic question: which is cheaper, fix the application or throw hardware at the problem? If you decide to throw hardware at the problem, it's relatively simple to determine what kind of hardware -- processors, memory or I/O subsystems -- need to be beefed up.
There are starting to be decent open source tools available, though. I've found that even with an excellent script capture tool like SilkPerformer, there's quite a bit of custom programming required on the driver side. So don't be afraid to use an open source driver tool if you understand the programming language it's based on.
As I mentioned (almost a dozen times in the last day or so ;) I'm building a Moodle-based community site for this, and one of the courses I want to put up is on open source load testing tools. Come on by http://linuxcapacityplanning.com
I don't have much faith in scenario B. There are good benchmarks available for processors, I/O subsystems and databases, but my experience has been that most performance problems are design issues in the application, not something in the underlying platform.
In the end, it becomes an economic question: which is cheaper, fix the application or throw hardware at the problem? If you decide to throw hardware at the problem, it's relatively simple to determine what kind of hardware -- processors, memory or I/O subsystems -- need to be beefed up.