Scaling up

Scaling up

by John Fenig -
Number of replies: 15

Today we had an interesting discussion among friends and colleagues about the scalability of Moodle (I have to admit I am a complete newbie to the Moodle community).

The basic question we were debating was "What sort of IT infrastructure would be needed to cater for about 2-4 Million students" via one institution? And how much would that set-up actually cost? 

Whilst some of us are totally in favor of Moodle, others are a bit more skeptical and I just want to get a general feeling for it.


Cheers and have all a splendid evening

John

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In reply to John Fenig

Re: Scaling up

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
This question is going somewhere... I'm torn between the Lounge and the Hardware and performance forum...
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In reply to John Fenig

Re: Scaling up

by Howard Miller -
Picture of Core developers Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Peer reviewers Picture of Plugin developers
Moodle scales (reasonably) easily by throwing hardware at the problem.

As ever, the question of how much of it you need depends on what those 2-4 million students (and that's quite a range right there) will be doing with it.
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Scaling up

by ben reynolds -
I'm replying just to avoid WOWing.
Howard, isn't the OU the only organization that works on this scale?
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Re: Scaling up

by Howard Miller -
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There are quite a few OU people around here who can speak for themselves, but I believe that this would be an order of magnitude larger than what even they do. I do recall hearing about an even larger site.
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Re: Scaling up

by Tim Hunt -
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The Open University (UK) has about 200,000 students actively studying at any time (and probably over 1 million rows in the user table in the database. And, the students that are studying are doing a lot of active online studying because it is distance education.

From a couple of conversations with people there, The Open University of China has about 2-3 million active users, but they have split that across about a dozen different Moodle instances. I think there are some single Moodle instances in the Arab world with over a million active users.

https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Language_customisation lists 7 Moodle sites with over a million users.
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In reply to Tim Hunt

Re: Scaling up

by John Fenig -
Hello guys,

Just before heading into the weekend, I thought I just let you know the extent of the “that’s what we want to have”

I have uploaded a doc, summarizing the requirements for this potential customer. I am not sure if I should just laugh, cry or wish them good luck and bugger off. We have this feeling that they try to get big into the lucrative private-sector education business, somewhere in Asia or SEA but have very little clue about the actual cost for such an endeavor.

I would luv to hear what any of you would guess would be the potential budget made available for this amazing opportunity.


Wish all an awesome weekend, I am going for a cold beer or maybe 2.... smile 

John
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Re: Scaling up

by Chris Fryer -

Well that's pretty cute. Most of the requirements in there are available in Moodle, and you can download it for free. Want to estimate how much it would cost to develop from scratch? Millions, of any currency you choose.

Plus you can run it on a database, web server, script interpreter, file system, and operating system that are also completely free.

Developing that all from scratch?

Billions.

The only things that aren't free are hardware, because the marginal costs aren't zero, and your time, because you probably need to eat.

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In reply to John Fenig

Re: Scaling up

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Is this a thought experiment or a boost for Moodle in the number game or do you really have a potential customer?

If you have the resources, or want to join hands, here is an opportunity: 250 million students suddenly require teaching online.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Scaling up

by John Fenig -
Hello Visvaneth,

thanks for your commend. Well, let's say we do have a potential customer who unfortunately does not want to spend any money on it. He practically wants the "Free Moodle", able to cater for up to 2 Million students with all the features that Moodle can provide but he does not want to invest in IT infrastructure or any technical support capacity.

A typical case of "I want the Mercedes engine in the Toyota, it should perform like a Mercedes but it should not cost more than a Toyota" smile

Cheers

John
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Re: Scaling up

by Howard Miller -
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We see this quite regularly. It's normally from someone with minimal Moodle knowledge wanting to serve a quiz to some vast number of students all at the same time.

When we ask for justification for the numbers and/or suggest ways of lessening the server load they will never be heard from again wink
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: Scaling up

by John Fenig -
Hello Howard,

yeah, same thoughts smile I thought about reaching out to OU as they obviously running one of the largest Moodle set-ups worldwide to see how much they had to invest in IT Infrastructure and technical support capacity.

I have to say, I am not the IT guy but the business guy who makes the call whether to pursue it or not and to be honest, even our IT staff was a bit surprised by the audacity of the demand and the budget that was offered.

Cheers

J
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Re: Scaling up

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi

No, I don't think he is looking for a Toyota. What he is planning must be worthless. If it is of any value, say $ 0.01 p.a. each user, there will be an yearly budget of $ 20 k.

What surprises me the most is that he does not want to invest in IT infrastructure. He must be have taken the running joke "Cloud is somebody else's computer" literally.
smile

You should help him to come down to the real world. An LMS has something to do with technology and engineering. These things are in turn bound by the laws of physics.
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