I am administering a moodle site which has been up and running for about 3 years, running on 2.9.1 (build 20150711).
We have approximately 50 courses. The courses use the Quiz activity. They consist of somewhere between 8 and 20 quizes, each of which has some number of questions (usually about 10 questions) to be answered by the student. The student submits his quiz attempt which is manually graded by the teacher.
The courses run indefinitely and a person can enroll on the course at any time and do the course at his own pace. (As opposed to the course running for a semester or period and then being reset.)
As a result, there are large numbers of students enrolled on some courses. The largest course has about 1200 students on the course.
But the number of students active at any one time is not that high. Per the server statistics there are approximately 250 logins per day, which is approximately 160 unique students per day.
I have various complaints about performance of the site, particularly for the Teacher role. Getting into the grading pages for the larger courses is very slow and sometimes the page gets an error due to a timeout or something.
I am seeking general advice on how to improve performance. Even with 1200 students on a course it doesn't seem like this should cause a performance issue. A mysql/mariadb database should be able to deal with that volume of data without any difficulty.
I am hoping that there is some obvious incorrect setting or basic maintenance action that would open the door to markedly increased performance.
Any advice as to recommended RAM, CPU, apache settings, mysql settings for optimum performance would be welcomed. As well as any troubleshooting steps I could take to analyze where the problem lies.
Thank you in advance!
Chris Biggs