To start with, if you have the server capacity available, then you can experiment with goemaxima in quite a low-risk way by setting up a new install of that, while leaving your maximapool setup in place. Then, all you need to do to switch between them is to change the
URL in the STACK setting in Moodle. So, you could do back-to-back performance comparisons, and you could initially use goemaxima at low-stakes times, but stay using maximapool at high stakes times, until you are sure it is right to permanently switch.
The reasons I believe goemaxima is better (even though I am one of the two people who created maximapool 10 or more years ago) are:
1. goemaxima is implemented using more appropriate technologies for the task at hand. The wrapper around Maxima is written in Go, not
Java + Tomcat, so it is a much more lightweight wrapper. Also it can use appropriate operating system mechanisms (fork) to rapidly spawn the required Maxima processes. This means that goemaxima is likely to be significantly faster / higher throughput on the same hardware.
2. The end result is packaged up as a Docker container, which is a very convenient way to build and deploy the required setup (once you have got your head around Docker!) You can take goemaxima's pre-build containers, but we chose to build our own with the particular version of STACK code, and Maxima that we want to use (built using their build files, just changing the configuration.)
3. That containerisation is good if you are deploying onto infrastructure like Kubernetes or AWS Farngate, which can give you automated scaling of the available resources as load changes.
4. goemaxima seems to be more actively maintained than maximapool.
