We have a rather large institution with a potential 40,000 users at any given time (our usual amount of users is usually much less).
We have disabled our RSS feed fuction sitewide out of fear that the many RSS requests could possibly slow down our app server.
What we are trying to find out is if other institutions with large userbases have used RSS feeds and what the impact is on performance, if any.
On that same note, the read tracking for forums was also disabled under that same fear. Does read tracking (keeping track of what forum postings were read) have any adverse effect on server performance?
Our current setup is as follows:
One xserve running as an app server/file server (apache2)
one xserve running as database server
one xserve running as a backup database/app server
*bump*
I am creating Podcasts currently for Deeside College in North Wales, these are the same issues i am confronting, i will only offer students to download podcasts from discussuion forums. In Deeside College there are over thousands of students on their database, however, i concluded that our intranet server, in which moodle is, might suffer from the increased requests to download podcasts and it may crash. It has in the past.
I would predict if i did succeed, our server would incurr reduced performance, and more downtime. At least it is what probably would happen.
Do Not worry padawan! Itunes U already do it at Universities and it is very successfull as students download lectures, lessons and critical talks.