Server experience...

Server experience...

by Rob Delissen -
Number of replies: 2

This week I found out our moodle-server was NOT sufficient.

E-smith 5.6 (templated Readhat installation)

Asus P2BS board, P III 450, 2x9 Gb scsi in software raid 1, 256 mb. Serves nothing but Moodle.

30 simultane users did the trick: I could hear the harddisks before I opened the serverroom.

Upgrading  to 1 Gb ram gave some relief, but it slowed down again at around 30 users.  This time the CPU seemed the bottleneck.

I temporarily moved the installation to a 3GHZ Xeon Compaq, 2Gb ram today, in order to keep our users from leaving our Moodle Project. Seems to run smoothly now.

Did I miss some tuning?

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In reply to Rob Delissen

Re: Server experience...

by David Delgado -
CPU usage and database access seem to be always the main problem. Memory is not a great problem (anyway it is better having 512MB at least). You can get a much better CPU performance using a PHP Cache (PHP Cache itself, Turck MM Cache, etc.). You can get even better results using latest MySQL 4.0.x, since it provides a database query cache wich is very good. Do not use MySQL 4.1 or 5.0, since they are still experimental.

On the other hand, you can outsource your Moodle services to http://moodle.com/hosting, and get a good service optimized just for Moodle and customized by the very main developer: Martin Dougiamas. It would cost you 100$/moth, but you would have all your hardware and admin problems solved.

Hope this helps.
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In reply to Rob Delissen

Re: Server experience...

by Richard Watkins -
The processor is more than likely the bottleneck in your P3 machine. I ran Moodle on a Celeron 2GHz (1GB RAM) and that struggled with more than about 50 users. Installing a PHP accelerator (in my case Turck MMCache as I am running Win 2K) solved the issue very nicely.
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