Respected, in my country, the Republic of N. Macedonia, our Ministry of education has established Moodle LMS, in conjunction with MS Teams, for at least about 25,000+ (25-thousand) teachers and 250,000 (250-thousand) students that will be used simultaneously in interaction, in 5 (five) languages of instruction: Macedonian, Albanian, Turkish, Serbian, Bosnian. This system will be tested tomorrow and day after tomorrow on 28 and 29th of September 2020. I am just curious and suspicious about the successful realization of this kind of MOODLE usage. What is your opinion about this? PS> If you have already answered a lot of questions from our IT-management MOODLE team and clarified the hardware that is needed for this system as well as the internet link with the needed traffic flow, then just neglect my questions and this topic. Best regards, JaniS.
In reply to Jani Servini
Re: Moodle for an extremely large number of users
by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Hi Jani
A Moodle site 25 k teachers and potentially 250 k students is huge. I am not saying that this has never been done. In fact, there are reports of sites over 1 million users. Obviously they have consumed mega resources. Coming back to your site, two things to note:
1. When it goes on-line tomorrow, it is unlikely that those 275 k users will try to log in the same day. It takes some time - weeks or even months - for the people to get organized. Getting user accounts, organizing classrooms, teachers putting there content on-line, getting their students enrolled. The system administrators are hopefully monitoring the load on the system and can predict when it will be overloaded, giving them enough time to plan the next stage. See How do you monitor your Moodle server?
A Moodle site 25 k teachers and potentially 250 k students is huge. I am not saying that this has never been done. In fact, there are reports of sites over 1 million users. Obviously they have consumed mega resources. Coming back to your site, two things to note:
1. When it goes on-line tomorrow, it is unlikely that those 275 k users will try to log in the same day. It takes some time - weeks or even months - for the people to get organized. Getting user accounts, organizing classrooms, teachers putting there content on-line, getting their students enrolled. The system administrators are hopefully monitoring the load on the system and can predict when it will be overloaded, giving them enough time to plan the next stage. See How do you monitor your Moodle server?
2. It is highly unlikely that those 275 k users will ever be simultaneous the way we in this forum understand the term. See https://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance_FAQ#How_do_you_define_.22concurrent_users.22.3F. You need an estimate on the real concurrency, based of experience. Which again will develop as time goes on. See point 1.
Now about the questions from your IT in this forum, where are they? Curiously, although you have been on moodle.org for 12 years, this is your first enquiry(?) Are you part of the IT team? If not you can't do the monitoring I was talking above. As a user you can at most run some kind of a development tool in your browser to analyze the reaction times of the site.
We have a number of different clients that are a similar scale to this. (some much higher) The ratio of 1 teacher to 10 students is amazing though!
The fact that your team is performing "testing" is a great sign - it does typically require a good level of understanding on how Moodle works to implement a site this scale - particularly getting things like the caching and database layer performing correctly. It can be really expensive to get this wrong and can easily double your hosting costs.
Hopefully your IT team has been engaging directly with a Moodle Partner in your region who has been helping them to design a system.
Moodle can cope with this level of users fine - however you do need to have the right people looking after the system with an appropriately sized budget for the hardware cost.
Thanks for sharing about the project here!
The fact that your team is performing "testing" is a great sign - it does typically require a good level of understanding on how Moodle works to implement a site this scale - particularly getting things like the caching and database layer performing correctly. It can be really expensive to get this wrong and can easily double your hosting costs.
Hopefully your IT team has been engaging directly with a Moodle Partner in your region who has been helping them to design a system.
Moodle can cope with this level of users fine - however you do need to have the right people looking after the system with an appropriately sized budget for the hardware cost.
Thanks for sharing about the project here!