A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Nadav Kavalerchik -
Number of replies: 16
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Hello DevOps, and SysAdmins of large scale Moodle instances,

From all the Moodle forums, I hope this is the relevant group to post this smile

Recently, we had several internal meeting for sharing information and discussions of IT responsible for large scale Moodle deployments over the GÉANT pan-European data network for the research and education community, and since we found the need for a quick way of communicating  our specific issues, we decided to open a new Telegram group for DevOps IT interested in sharing information and helping each other with that specific focus.

We have started updating the main Moodle wiki with all the information that is shared in the chat.

Here is one main page we update: https://docs.moodle.org/310/en/Large_installations (Hope it is the proper page) and also other performance related pages too.

We invite you to join the discussion, if this is relevant to you.


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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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Hi Nadav

Help for clustering was traditionally thin on this forum, although it is catching up recently. So an  initiative to bring those experts together is very welcome.

My question: Does it have to be something outside the moodle.org forums? There is always a critical mass for the dynamics and sustainability of a voluntary group. Break it in to two, each smaller than the critical mass, both will go stale. Sadly, I have gone through this process more than once in my community activities. I am not saying that the same will be true for this new initiative, only the time will tell. So, please don't change plans. Just wanted to say why I won't be there. May be I am not in the invited group anyway. wink
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Marcus Green -
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Though I understand Visvanath's reservations I'm in. Two reasons I heard about it from Nadav, so instant credibility, plus it is Telegram so it is a different medium to these forums.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Nadav Kavalerchik -
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I completely agree that splitting a potential community into fragments can make it stale. I also experience it so many times in the past, and it was a big concern for us.

Each medium has its group of people that are used to it and find the benefit of using it. it has a lot to the way different people organize information cognitively, and the frequency of communication needed.
I am involved with many Moodle projects and each one has different kind of people that uses mediums like: Facebook, Google discussion forms, Slack, Telegram, Whatsapp, internal project Moodle forums, other specific discussion oriented communication channels.
I personally feel comfortable using several mediums, with their advantages and dis-advantages. so I guess I can (and probably others too) be connectors and equalizers of information between those mediums, as I imagine certain people will continue to use the medium they prefer and it will be hard to make them migrate.

It was actually inspired by looking at the way the Moodle developer chat in Telegram is active, and we were aiming for a similar shared information support group experience.

Also, a lot of what we are dealing with is not related to "Hardware and Performance" but to wider end to end project management of large scale Moodle systems, out side of the Moodle itself. to the entire project environment that support it. discussion that is not really limited the technology side of Moodle. which felt weird to be discussed in a Moodle forum. (or maybe I am wrong? not sure)

Anyways, as I wrote in the initial post, we will be putting all the accumulated discussed knowledge in the main Moodle wiki.

Hope this make some sense of the decision.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Howard Miller -
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Yeh - when I'm properly stuck I often ask in the developer Telegram forum and somebody chips in and helps. I would say that I'm a pretty experienced Moodle user but I still get stuck regularly. It's a shame because it takes away from these forums. I wish more people with in-depth knowledge would come here and help people if they could. There's a number of subjects that it's mostly a waste of time asking questions about.

It would be a shame if this went the same way....
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
Hi Nadav

A completely different question: Does this post have to be sticky?

Usually the sticky post is a "must read" for all visiting the forum - for things like compulsory documentation, netiquette. Or during a crisis, the status of the "burning issue" so that the forum won't be flooded with the same question. But this one is an invitation for a "elite club", it doesn't address the common visitor. (See the running topics.) I assume that the elite club is subscribed to the forum, and would have received a copy of a normal (non-sticky) post. And that it to the forum documentation for the newcomer. If you want to reach a broad crowd and the new group is sanctioned by the higher authorities, they will post the news in the site announcements. In any case all one-time. This is not something one has to see daily.

And, in a personal tone, I have an accessibility issue. I regularly check for new posts in this forum. The two sticky posts block my view! 90% of the time I'm on this 1366x768 pixel laptop. (See the attached screen-shot.)

Attachment mx-desktop.png
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Nadav Kavalerchik -
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Hello Visvanath Ratnaweera,
Sorry for not replying sooner, as I did not notice your post until today.
Sorry to read the inconvenience this post is causing you.
I did not make it sticky, and I do not think I have the permissions to do it.
Anyone who is managing this forum can feel free to change its stickiness, if that is indeed not relevant anymore.

Though I do think the last few months were a special and unique time frame, where a lot of big institutes had to up their game and infrastructure to support the massive grow in online education, and this new group made a very meaningful impact to all those how joined it, and still joining daily. maybe, due to the stickiness of this post. who knows. large part of the discussions are infrastructure and performance related, and I see major correlation to issues discussed on this forum.
It is defensively not an "elite club", but just an alternative medium for rapid and convenient communication channel to those who use Telegram.
You are welcome too if the topics and communication frequency feels relevant to you.

Best regards,
Nadav
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Alain Raap -
Nadav, I understand Visvanath's remarks about the Telegram group, I also am very interested in large scale Moodle deployments and I don't use Telegram, so I'm already excluded from interesting information. Why not share your best-practices on this subject here in this forum? Or is this already shared somewhere?
Indeed digital learning is growing very fast (the number of students and courses) and also scalability and performance is an important issue. How fast can you adapt change when your Moodle site is growing faster than your IT department or sysadmins can handle? Maybe an interesting discussion how to handle these subjects in this fast changing world?
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In reply to Alain Raap

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Nadav Kavalerchik -
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@Alain, for several years now, I am concerned with the fragmentation of information on the different media channels, websites, forums, social networks, ... But we can not stop people from evolving and adopting to new ways of communication technologies, we need to adopt too.
I take some little bit of comfort in knowing that Google index most of it, so it is always good to search Google after you tried to get an answer to your question on your favorite channel of communication.

I regularly try to update the Moodle wiki page: https://docs.moodle.org/310/en/Large_installations with interesting best-practice topics and solutions that come up in the Telegram public group chat, and also update other relevant wiki pages as well.

It feels funny to post: "TIP: Did you know you can ..." on the forums, but maybe it is something to consider.

I will try to have the content of the Telegram public group available as read only archive on the Moodle site, the same way the Telegram developer chat is available. (https://moodle.org/local/chatlogs/)
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Dr. Nellie Deutsch -
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When will the chat log form Telegram be available for public viewing?
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Alain Raap -
@Nadav thanks for your message, I search with Google and also in the forums here when I have a problem with our Moodle stack, but some questions are difficult to post, also because not all information I can share here about our infrastructure. The wiki page I also visited in the past, but the information was to outdated then (Moodle versions 2.x postings) and are not representative for this time anymore.

I can't visit the chatlogs link, isn't it available yet? Thanks for sharing the content anyway!
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Nadav Kavalerchik -
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Here is an updated export of the Telegram chat:
http://moodlemagic.info/moodle/large_scale_systems_telegram_chat/messages.html
( I will keep it updated, monthly )
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Alain Raap -
Nadav, thanks for sharing and interesting to read the chat, I only missed the photo's that also gives interesting information (about architecture or technical information).
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In reply to Nadav Kavalerchik

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Howard Miller -
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Sorry - who is "we"?
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In reply to Howard Miller

Re: A new "Large scale Moodle deployment" support group

by Kunal Gholap -
Hi,

We have 5 University Applications running on one Virtual server (EC2) on the AWS cloud. We have MySQL Database configured for all applications also on the same server.

Out of these 5 Applications, 4 are working fine. But there is one Application which we launched last week which causing a slowness issue.

The landing page loads faster but when we log in to it and access any courses it getting slow. We check our server CPU load at that time which is below 30%.

At, /var/data directory we have an application folder(Application having slowness issue) inside this their many folders such as cache(644MB), filedir(23GB), lang(1.5MB), localache(9.8MB), lock(1020KB), muc(28KB), sessions(5.2 MB), temp(9.4 GB), trashdir(7.3 GB) so their are total 40 GB of data.

Post login the Application when we browse courses it takes too much time. The request is able to find a database but I guess the file size of courses is huge so it taking time to load, so are any settings in the MySQL database that I could do so large files can able to load quickly? Please find the Mysql config file attached.
Also, In MySQL when we run SHOW FULL PROCESSLIST; we saw our application DB (application having slowness) whose command sleep time keeps incrementing.

Moodle version- Moodle 3.8.3+ (Build: 20200512) Version 2019111803.01

php version- 7.2

Mysql Version- 5.7.32-0ubuntu0.18.04.1










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