I am searching on the Moodle site for peformance and hardware recommendations, because I ran into a performance problem on our own Moodle website. When I take a look at the performance page of my Moodle version (https://docs.moodle.org/35/en/Performance_recommendations) then I see some links that refer to information of 2006, that's really outdated!
Where can I find some more recent information about performance recommendations and shared experiences on this subject?
Also I sometimes find it difficult to find specific information about a problem I am dealing with (last one was about our new infrastucture that doesn't perform as expected). I think the requirements for a Moodle website are becoming much more complex and high when having a site for a large organisation, university or governmental organisation with large networks, firewalls, content scanning and Security Operations Centers that demand a hardened OS and secure website. And also the students / teachers that expect a stable and fast site to follow / make courses 24/7. Downtime of the online learning environment is becoming more and more unacceptable (as I experienced myself). How do you deal as a Moodle admin with these growing demands of your Moodle environment? Maybe off topic in this forum, but I'm curious about your own experiences.
Hi Alain
I saw your enquiry Backup and restore Automated Backups are taking more time to create. For the size of your operation I thought it is "normal". Don't misunderstand me, I don't say steadily increasing automated backup times is a good thing. What I know is that Moodle goes through huge disk lifting and any normal disk storage is too slow. In addition you have a clustered environment I am not familiar with (well each cluster is different ;) ).
Yes, Moodle Docs is a sad story. Let's not talk about it. If you like reading tragedies, search Moodle community sites from the beginning. @other regulars, don't ask me (again), I have wasted enough time on this topic.
Thanks for your reaction, and about the backup problem, I'm still investigating this issue. When you change the Moodle stack, it's always surprising what the performance will do.
Just when you expect it'll be better, the opposite happens
Not talking about Moodle docs, but how could we share experiences and best-practices to setup a Moodle site here? A lot of questions come back here each time is what I see.
Hi Alain
I imagine (yes, imagination) you can not accelerate by tuning short of redesigning the whole subsystem.
Did you consider releasing a node full-time to do the course backups, that through the admin/cli/automated_backups.php? Thankfully, that script respects the Automated backup settings.
To talk about Moodle Docs the right place is the Moodle community sites forum.
Hi Visvanath,
The only way you can increase the performance of the backups, is to position all the data and the database on a separate server. And that worked very good (with a second Moodle instance on this server). But that's broken now in our new environment. So finally we got rid of NFS and in return we got a worser backup performance.
You mentioned stack has changed ... what version of Moodle?
Also what has changed concerning stack?
'SoS', Ken
We're not using NFS anymore and our Linux environment was migrated to Ansible Tower and Redhat Satellite
And also this https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=385643. But both are outdated as you have changed your system architecture, I understand.
I assume that queries for the backups run much faster on the database server itself than run via the network. But that's not
possible now anymore, as the moodledata has moved to the application server. If you want a fast backup run, create a separate
Moodle instance on the database server together with the moodledata as I explained in the previous link of Visvanath.
Well, Ansible Tower and Redhat Satellite is certainly not a common set up seen in these forums (for sure).
Anything 'dynamic' ... scripting that is calling/using backended DB ... a concern for speed and configuration of networking as well as DB server itself always a concern.
I see in Ansible:
https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/latest/modules/list_of_all_modules.html#all-modules
mysql_info – Gather information about MySQL servers
mysql_replication – Manage MySQL replication
mysql_variables – Manage MySQL global variables
So ... a deeper dive ... what does info script above show ... how about the variables script as well?
Running replication?
'SoS', Ken
making it easier for us to maintain our Moodle environments with dashboards to configure / run playbooks and to deploy software packages.
Unfortunately I'm not allowed to share our database server information and variables here, but thanks for the tip!