Moodle 3.9 Performance

Moodle 3.9 Performance

Sander Bangma -
回帖数：26

Hi All,

We've made a number of good performance enhancements in Moodle 3.9 and I'm keen to get wider community feedback on the effectiveness of them out in the wild. 

In particular issues like reducing session locks can have a big impact on large sites.

We're keen to hear about your experience with 3.9 so far and if you can share test results/statistics and tips for everyone to benefit would be very much appreciated! 微笑

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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Tim Hunt -
Core developers的头像 Documentation writers的头像 Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像 Peer reviewers的头像 Plugin developers的头像
The OU will upgrade to 3.9 in December. We'll try to remember to get back to you then!

I hope that some people can get back to you with some numbers earlier than the.
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回复Tim Hunt

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Ивица Лазаревић -

I have small VPS (2GB RAM, 50GB SSD) and older Moodle 3.6 and Moodle 3.8 which works perfect. I am using Postgresql 10.13. I have just installed Moodle 3.9 and performance is very bad on clean install. It takes few seconds to open any page 伤心.

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回复Ивица Лазаревић

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像 Translators的头像

Did you go through the https://docs.moodle.org/39/en/Performance_recommendations ?

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回复Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Ивица Лазаревић -

Sorry, my bad. Everthing is fine with 3.9, I tought it was clean install but my colegue turned on Theme designer mode so Moodle did not use cache. Now it is as fast as older versions (or maybe faster). Thank you for the reply!

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回复Ивица Лазаревић

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Walter Byrd -
Could you tell me how many users you can have on your site at one time, and still get good performance? Any idea how well your site would perform if you had 1GB of memory instead of 2GB?
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回复Walter Byrd

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Ивица Лазаревић -

I think the maximum number of users at one time was about 120 students doing exam. I did not test how it would perform for more. For my usecase 1GB would be sufficient, but I have a whole bunch of low trafic web sites on my Linode beside Moodle. The bigest problem that I have right now is disk usage. Moodledata folder consumed 25GB filled with assignment images. After course resets moodledata retained 15GB of those assignment files (assignsubmission_pdf), for which I dont know what is the right way to clean.

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回复Ивица Лазаревић

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Walter Byrd -
Thank you for reply. I wonder if you could put MoodleData on AWS?
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回复Walter Byrd

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Ивица Лазаревић -

I havent been using AWS so I can't tell for sure, but I think you could use EBS https://aws.amazon.com/ebs/. I am not sure about S3. I do not plan to switch to AWS since Linode has similar offering both for object storage (compatible with S3) and block storage. I will consider in future block storage from Linode (1$ per 10GB). My problem is disk space leaking, so problem would remain no matter how much disk space do I have.

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回复Ивица Лазаревић

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Basil Gohar -

I noticed that you are looking at Linode and interested in using Object Storage for Moodle.  I have the same interest, and what I've found so far is that Moodle's Amazon S3 repository support is strictly limited to Amazon unless I have missed something.  That is to say, you cannot specific S3-compatible endpoints, you must pick from specific, hard-coded Amazon ones.

I'd love to be proven wrong, because I plan to ask specifically about this myself.  I just figured I should comment here first since you are looking for the same kind of support.

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回复Basil Gohar

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Ивица Лазаревић -
In the end I did not use Linode Object Storage. Instead I changed provider. For the roughly same amount of money I got 160GB SSD and 8GB RAM with 2 dedicated cores from Netcup. This is the plan I purchased: https://www.netcup.eu/bestellen/produkt.php?produkt=2620 Compared to Linode it looks too good to be true, but so far it is working great. I ran Moodle Benchmark on the same site on Linode and Netcup and got a 3x better score on Netcup! With the new provider I don't have an Object Storage option any more, instead I can mount additional NFS storage (up to 1TB) and use it without any additional configuration on Moodle side, and the price for NFS is less than Linode Object Storage! I have not tested the NFS option yet. SSD is super fast (compared to Linode) but I am worried about NFS. I guess it should be fine if I move only filedir directory to NFS and keep cache and other folders on SSD. For now I will upgrade to the 320GB plan when I hit 160GB. I would like to hear if someone has experience with moodledata/filedir mounted on NFS.
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回复Ивица Лазаревић

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Alain Raap -
We had experience with moodledata/filedir on NFS, it's difficult to tune and to get a fast and reliable connection with the NFS server. We also had a problem with an antivirus program installed that hang up our server (with NFS server) with kerneltimeouts at random moments, so be aware of that if you choose for NFS as a solution. I posted some messages in the forums here about how we configured the NFS share, that was fast enough for us: https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=362709&mode=3
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回复Walter Byrd

Re: Fresh Moodle 3.9 takes few seconds to open any page

Kapila Jayasinghe -
We use EFS to store MoodleData. I/O can make things really slow rarely (especially when updating/upgrading etc). This is the only feasible option when you use auto-scaling.
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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Rick Jerz -
Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像 Testers的头像
Sander, my Moodle is quite small, around 12-15 courses each year, about 500 total students in these courses each year. So I don't think that session locks have ever affected my Moodle. I upgraded to Moodle 3.9 on 6/15/20, from Moodle 3.8.3+ (Build 20200522), and do not notice any "performance" changes. But this is good, my Moodle is not any slower! 😀 🏅

The only problem that I encountered is that I modify my Moodle so that the right-side columns in Boost can be collapsed (see MDL-57305.)  The new "Turn editing on" button, which by the way, I really like, was added to "core_renderer.php," which was one of the files that I had been modifying.  Not a big problem, once I probed.  You will see my notes about this in MDL-57305.  The ability to collapse a right-side block is extremely important.  For example, this summer I have 120 students in one of my courses.  If 30 are logged in, the Online Users block becomes quite deep.  And there are other blocks that become really troublesome (like the Checklist plugin) when one cannot collapse the right-side block.  Maybe in Moodle 4.0 this feature will be implemented.  🤩

I really like the new features built into the Participants web page (searching).  Really well-done!

Of course, I keep encountering very subtle features that are nice.  I can't say that anything new in 3.9 is bothersome.

Tell the development team that their hard work is appreciated.  Keep up the good work.   是的


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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Enrique Castro -
Core developers的头像
Hi:
At ULPGC I have been maintaining a 3.9dev site with our customizations since january. Everything has been working OK. HI have several test sites with very good performance compared to 3.5 in the same system.

Now we are working in a pre-production system to be moved to production in July with 3.9. And now we have a problem. The system is OK for regular users working on course pages. But as soon as an Admin user goes to the admin interface and uses admin pages to change settings, the performance for that user is catastrophic, terribly slow. Page load times are in minutes values.

Any idea??
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回复Enrique Castro

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Tim Hunt -
Core developers的头像 Documentation writers的头像 Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像 Peer reviewers的头像 Plugin developers的头像
What sort of caching setup are you using?

It could be that the changes that the admin makes are causing come caches to be purged, and this is slowing things down until the cache has re-warmed. (And if you are using memcache, its limitations make the problem much worse.)
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回复Enrique Castro

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Ken Task -
Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像

Are these admin users admins in all sites?

IF so, cookie prefix the same or different for each site.  Browser cache can get confused/large and has to sort out more for admin level users.

My 2 cents.

'SoS', Ken

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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Bishwanath Jha -

Hi All,

First for all thanks for making such great improvements in terms of performance by Moodle Team. Lot of slow queries are gone now.

We have updated our moodle from 3.8 to 3.9 on 19th July and suddenly we have started facing two issues which was not faced before. We are using Redis(Elastic cache) for session, Aurora MySql with autoscaling and EC2 linux instances with autoscaling. We have quite good load coming to server during the day time like say 1000+ students are hitting on the same time.

1) Getting huge number of slow queries logged like below and query time is around 25 to 80 sec. Which is a big problem for us.

# Time: 200720  2:44:31
# Query_time: 80.011756  Lock_time: 0.000000 Rows_sent: 1  Rows_examined: 0
SET timestamp=1595213071;
SELECT GET_LOCK('418865d95a81bf4014128aa00b9026703cd40a13', '97') AS locked;
Interesting part is the key string inside the get lock function is same in the all slow lock query. Not sure if we are using Redis for session then why lock is required in database.

2) We are using localcache directory. The size of the directory is ever growing like atm its 32GB. It was not making localcache earlier.

$CFG->localcachedir = '/var/www/cache';  // Intended for local node caching 

Not finding solution so far and its not possible to go back to the previous version as well. Something sure has been cause after upgrade only. Looking forward to your help.

Thanks,

Bishwanath

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回复Bishwanath Jha

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Graeme Henderson -

How are you using AWS Aurora MySql if it is not supported in version 3.9?  It looks like it will only be supported from version 3.10

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回复Graeme Henderson

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Kapila Jayasinghe -
We have been using Aurora-MySQL (Engine version 5.7.mysql_aurora.2.07) for a couple of years with Moodle 35 (production) and now with Moodle 39 (in Dev mode) without any issues. AWS EC2/RDS/ElastiCache (Redis)/EFS
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回复Bishwanath Jha

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Bishwanath Jha -
Replying to my own comment as the issue #1(GET_LOCK issue) is resolved, it was caused due to CRONS running in parallel.
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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Particularly helpful Moodlers的头像 Translators的头像
Hi Sander

We upgraded from 3.5 to 3.9 last week. A group of active teachers tested 3.9 for almost three months - we started with 3.9dev. Their main concern was the functionality, most importantly whether 3.9 is "downward compatible". No concerns there, except for some uncertainty with H5P and Safe Exam Browser. Also some "false" predictions from Insights (Analytics) irritated the managers.

I haven't done any systematic performance comparisons. But subjectively, quickly navigating as the admin, 3.9 feels snappy just as the 3.5. Nightly automatic course backups take roughly the same duration. No synchronized on-line exams yet. The academic year starts tomorrow. Will report if something unexpected comes up.

P.S. I thought you expected quantitative results of performance comparisons between 3.9 and its predecessors - not to be an assorted catch-all thread for all the performance problems people have in the latest release. But that is happening. I think the subject "Moodle 3.9 Performance" is too suggestive. Being a sticky post makes matters worse. It would be a pity, if enquiries on performance problems first land here and the moderator have separate them.
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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Abror Aliboyev -

Hi We recently upgraded to moodle 3.9.1 And started new academic year with it. Site loads fast with few users. But usually there are 300 users online. And we are having problems on handling too many queries. I turned debugging on and saw that the problem is with our db. 

problem

And with few users debugger shos this 

with few users

I didn't understand what is causing a problem.

Need your help.

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回复Abror Aliboyev

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Tomasz Muras -
Core developers的头像 Plugin developers的头像 Plugins guardians的头像 Translators的头像

What is the database you're using? If it's MySQL then turn on "slow queries" logging and see what is logged there, when you open this site.

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回复Sander Bangma

Re: Moodle 3.9 Performance

Eric Taylor -
176 points on an Azure Windows instance. As always, the primary tip is to move your caching folders to a tiny HD partition where AV is disabled because it complete hozes cache writes.

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