Hi,
I would like to know, whether I can go and install and run with the following configuration:
Godaddy Virtual Private Server of 8GB RAM and 240 GB Storage and unlimited bandwidth capacity for a school of 3000 students
Please do guide me on this.
As students might be using quiz and forum, chat modules and teachers for various lesson and assignments modules.
Thanks in advance
S Rao.
Well, we can't tell you how much storage you will need....
Ultimately, it depends on exactly what the users will be doing - and how many of them at the same time. 3000 accounts is a different thing to 3000 active users. However, for what sounds like a reasonable large school, and assuming that they do not plan to make heavy use of Moodle, then you have a good chance of it working fine.
What I always advise is never jump in like this. Do a pilot for a few months and monitor the system. Then you'll have some solid information to go on.
We ran with a virtual dedicated of that size up to last year that served about 1600 unique account logins a week (an account is counted only once in that time - better metric than number of accounts) with 1.9 and it did great. We didn't run 2 on a virtual dedicated, so I am not able to give direct experience with that one.
When we moved to Moodle 2.9 last summer we moved to a fully dedicated server (2TB hard disk, 4 core, 16GB RAM, Linux/CENTOS). We are still serving about 1600 unique log-ins per week with 80 to 160 simultaneous (active within last five minutes per the online user's block) users during peak. I have found that we only use about 3/4 of the RAM so far, so less RAM would do fine. Moodle 2.9 has taxed the CPU. We run at 100% on the CPU quite a bit during peak hours through the week. When we do, the site slows down quite a bit. Not many complaints though unless a whole class goes to a quiz at once during peak. We are looking at strategies to naturally stagger that so that large a group moving to Moodle will spread out over a 5 minute window such as end of lecture activities that are outside of Moodle. Students will finish that activity at different rates giving a less intense spike of quiz loads. We are strongly considering splitting the database to a separate server which is common when you have on-site servers, but due to the expense isn't too common on hosted Moodle until you start maxing your cores. It is a logical next step in growth.
Splitting out the database is also a good idea from the point of view of tuning the system. It's a lot easier to tune a database server when you know that all the free memory can be dedicated to database. As opposed to having to make a call about web server / database server allocation.
Which reminds me, for standard distros neither MySQL or Apache are optimised for Moodle out of the box. MySQL is normally configured to use a limited amount of memory and Apache is configured to serve static web pages (rather than huge PHP pages). Apache tends to eat resources and MySQL doesn't grab enough. With ram being relatively cheap these days you can, effectively, keep the database in memory if you do it right.
Howard, I have worked on optimizing my MySQL with modifications being made to my my.cnf file. Might you be able to point me to some good resources about optimizing Apache for Moodle? I have been wanting to learn about this for quite awhile. Or is what is provided in the Moodle docs our best resource? Thanks.
The Moodle docs information is a good start. It is certainly a lot better than doing nothing. There loads of information online about tuning Apache (e.g. http://www.tecmint.com/apache-performance-tuning/).
I think it's always important to monitor you system to understand what's going on. Simplest is probably munin - especially if you enable Apache's ExtendedStatus setting. That will tell you over time, how much resource Apache (and other things) are using.