Hi Francisco
I was reluctant to give my opinion not having maintained a 11,000 user site. I will stay away from the technical side other than suggesting to read the forum documentation:
Performance and
Performance FAQ.
Here are few thoughts on planning:
- The "big bang model" is not suitable for planning a web application. It is not the way the virtual world works. Yes, in the analog world, it is quite clear, say, how to plan a condominium. You can start at the number of tenants (users), then go on so many apartments of that many rooms, etc. Because you know the space occupy by a person, the consumption of gas, electricity, water per person, how much garbage, etc. But not in the case of the web application. The development of users over the years is not predictable, nor how intensive a user interacts with the server. Well you can always say, I make the biggest building the land would support. But that would be a waste of money, not only for the construction, but also for maintenance thereafter. Even if you had the money, it would be a crime against our climate. We are in the middle of an environmental crisis!
- Setting up a server is the smallest part of the project. Compare the couple of days you'll need to get one running against the number of days in the next five years. Not counting the infrastructure you have to look after data security and integrity, backup and fail-over strategy, the development of functionality, add-ons, design (changing design), ideally a staging server to try out, etc. You know all these, since you already support a 11,000 user university. I am just putting things together for others too.
- I work with senior IT (Microsoft) administrators of institutions of respectable size. I am always surprised when I repeatedly hear "Moodle is not my world", in an angry voice. I think Moodle came from the Unix (or a think alike) world, so no surprise that now Linux dominates their servers. And where the hosting providers specializing in Moodle come to the picture. The first choice should be a Moodle Partner because they in turn heavily finance the further development of Moodle.
Still, I think you are in a comfortable situation. You have this server running, users are happy about Moodle the product and your service. If you closely monitor the service and the load you can plan (hardware and software) upgrades well in ahead. All depending on how the usage catches up.
There are many informative discussions in the forum. Some recent ones:
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Is my benchmark score any good?
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2500 concurrence Users
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Hardware /performance suggestion