What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Advait Nandeshwar -
Number of replies: 11

Hi all,

We are going to conduct a mock test, students can give the test from their homes. There would be around 1000 concurrent users giving the test. 

I am thinking to go for this DigitalOcean plan. 

RAM
32GB		CPUs
8vCPUs		B/W
7TB		Size
640GB		$/hr
$0.238		$/mo
$160

What are the other Apache2/ MySQL settings that I should keep in mind? I am not a server expert.

Any guidance would be highly appreciated.

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In reply to Advait Nandeshwar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
This question comes up in regular intervals with varying number of quiz users. See for example Conducting quiz for 2000 users https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=404539.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Advait Nandeshwar -
Thank you very much for the reply. I will surely check it out.
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In reply to Advait Nandeshwar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
No problem. You saw the forum documentation, https://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance and https://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance_FAQ, right?
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Advait Nandeshwar -
Yes, I did. I'm still bit unclear about the part, how much for me 😅. I did basic maths and I know I surely need around 50GB, I just also wanted to know any Apache & MySQL, i.e. php.ini & my.cnf file changes to suit my needs. Can you let me know if there's any article that could help? Thanks.
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In reply to Advait Nandeshwar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Where in the documentation does it say you need 50 GB?

About Apache, PHP, MySQL settings, no documentation can give you specific numbers, Moodle runs on all sorts of systems!
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Advait Nandeshwar -

“10-20 concurrent users per GB of memory” so 20 concurrent users per GB makes it 50GB for 1000 users.


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In reply to Advait Nandeshwar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Usman Asar -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Advait, there use to be a general guideline as a part of moodle documentation (now removed) of 1GB RAM for every 20 concurrent users, while some people wont agree on that I still keep it as a general starting point for hardware considerations, that being said it'll be 50GB RAM at minimum you'll be looking into for 1000 concurrent users.

Besides, its a virtual server at digital ocean, depending on the hypervisor vCPU can vary, hypervisors have settings of 2-8 vCPU's allocated per physical CORE, so 8 vCPU doesnt means you're getting equivalent of 8-core CPU's - keep that in mind.

I'll suggest, finding someone offering VDS with NVMe protocol drives, that would likely serve that many concurrent users at half the price.

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In reply to Usman Asar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Advait Nandeshwar -
The thing about Digitalocean is, I have credits with them so I thought I might use it. Secondly, I've decided to divide my task into 500-500 users giving test at the same but different droplets. 500 is my projected amount, real maybe less, since it's non compulsory. So let's say 300-350 users land on each server so which DigitalOcean droplet would you recommend? Thanks.
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In reply to Advait Nandeshwar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Usman Asar -
Picture of Plugin developers Picture of Testers

Surely no harm giving a try.

but, do one thing, when building up quiz, rather than adding 1 question per page, add 3-4 at least, this way calls to database will be lesser and it will accommodate users easily.

also in PHP, OpCache settings, increase value of max_accelerated_files and memory_consumption.

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In reply to Usman Asar

Re: What would be optimal requirements for conducting quiz of 1000 users simultaneously?

by Advait Nandeshwar -
Thank you will surely give it a try.
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