General help

Any advice on how to mirror a Moodle site in China?  Our China employees and customers indicate the speed is too slow to display our US hosted courses.  Our courses are SCORM, flash based with quizzes built into the course (not separate Moodle quizzes).

Is it possible to mirror the site but use the same user database for the US hosted site (hosted by a Moodle partner) so that authentication and reporting is all handled in one place.

Any advice will be appreciated.

Paul, it will be much easier to implement and manage one server location rather than mirroring, where are your current servers located? If you are serving content to corners then I would have chosen a geographically central location with 10Gbps network speeds.

Bi-directional replication is not hard to setup for database (even is free), for web servers, I am afraid I dont have any experience with Linux, but can give a bit more support on Windows based platforms as Hardware based Load Balancer can be set up to route clients coming from specific regions to particular servers. how easy/hard it is to setup in Linux (my hands are tight), but for Windows platforms ARR (Application Request Router) comes as free option and can as well be setup to route traffic geographically.

and so same does applies for Pam as well, If I would have been you, keeping database on a Amazon Cloud and rest setting up 2 physical locations, where load balancer are set to router traffic.

Maybe look into a Geo clustered LAMP? Keep Moodledata and Moodle folder in sync using bittorrent sync? I say bittorrent as how stupid easy it is to use and goes around firewalls so well.  I think you would need to still allow some kind of central folder for the cachedir and probably have master/master relationship with the database.

http://blog.bittorrent.com/2013/09/10/sync-hacks-how-to-use-bittorrent-sync-as-geo-replication-for-storage/