Hello All,
I have a Moodle installation hosted on www.bluehost.com. I have two active courses. The first has perhaps 200 students and the second 60 students. I expect that I may get 10 to 20 concurrent visitors during the semester.
Most of the content is static with the exception of the forum. Each student is expected to post not less than once a week but not more than four times a week. I expect the average number of posts per student to hover between 1 and 2.
I need to tune my Moodle server so that students get a reasonable throughput. I have gone through this forum but am not a hard core tech.
This is what I have done so far.
1. Disable all the modules except forum and resources and survey
2. Moved all large files to an external server and linked to them from Moodle.
What else can I do? I have read that.
1. Deleting Languages can help. How do I do that?
2. Turning off loging will also help. How do I do that as I cant find a place to turn off logs.
I have also seen that I can make changes to the .config type files but I do not know if I have access to them.
So what can I do myself (with a limited knowledge base) and what can I "resonably" ask bluehost to do for me?
Bluehost has been very good to me for the three months that I have used them. Very prompt and very helpful.
Many Thanks
Simon
Need to Tune Moodle Fast
Number of replies: 7
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
Simon
Just a thought... watch out that Bluehost do not have a limit on the number of concurrent mysql connections. I know of one in the UK which limits to 10 connections, so give their tech support a ring to check this one out.
Ken
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
Hello Simon
I am not a hardcore tech myself but just trying to apply logic.
You have moved large files to an external server. The question is 'Why'?
Will those large files be required by your students?
If yes, Then this will actually hamper speed because imagine the extra bandwidth consumed when all 20 of them are trying to access those files and an external server is being called.
If no, then why did you move them? they will not be called so not loaded.
I mean if you have already done this, there must be a sound technical reason and i wanna know that mainly because i am not a techie and my logic says the more pathways and redirections you have , the slower your systems perform....
Warm regards
I am not a hardcore tech myself but just trying to apply logic.
You have moved large files to an external server. The question is 'Why'?
Will those large files be required by your students?
If yes, Then this will actually hamper speed because imagine the extra bandwidth consumed when all 20 of them are trying to access those files and an external server is being called.
If no, then why did you move them? they will not be called so not loaded.
I mean if you have already done this, there must be a sound technical reason and i wanna know that mainly because i am not a techie and my logic says the more pathways and redirections you have , the slower your systems perform....
Warm regards
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
Redirects to another source/resource require very little in the way of resources. By moving the files to another server you remove the demand on the host system of having to do the disk reads and the network resources that are tied up during the actual file transfer.
The host simply delegates the file serving duties to another system so that it is freed up to take care of other higher priority duties
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
I have some large PDF and Real Media movies that I plan to
store on another server. I plan to link to these files from within my Moodle
courses. My thinking is that the Moodle server will not have to cope with
a ton of student downloads. I am on a shared server at bluehost so I want
to make sure that I do not exceed my allotted CPU load.
I am trying to ensure that the course pages load quickly and that the students
experience minimal delays using forums. I am not using chat (I hate chat
anyway) and will not use the quiz module this semester given the comment I have
seen in this forum.
I am willing to turn off anything that does not play a direct role in main page
loads, forums and the calendar. I also read that getting rid of
additional language support helps but I can find an obvious way to do this.
I would also like some advice on Cron. I see that some people set this to
run every 5 minutes to every 30 minutes. I am wondering if I should just
set Cron to run once a day at 4:00am
local time (2:00am bluehost time) when
the severs are lightly loaded. Is this advisable? What penalties will
this incur?
Thanks for your help.
Simon
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
If you set cron to run once a day any mail sent out by Moodle e.g. forums will only be sent out once a day!
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
From what i know, cron is required to send mails etc....
If your cron is set up once a day, ur mails will be sent once a day.....this MAY translate into a fact (note the capitalised MAY, coz i am not fully certain of this)....that a new account opener will NOT get an e-mail for anything upto 24 hrs........s/he may have to wait several hours when ur cron runs to send ur mail
....but do confirm this....i am uncertain.
But if this does happen, it's BAD.....no likes to put up with sites which send confirmatory mails after 18 hrs or so.
if all ur enrollments are manual, ENJOY
If your cron is set up once a day, ur mails will be sent once a day.....this MAY translate into a fact (note the capitalised MAY, coz i am not fully certain of this)....that a new account opener will NOT get an e-mail for anything upto 24 hrs........s/he may have to wait several hours when ur cron runs to send ur mail
....but do confirm this....i am uncertain.
But if this does happen, it's BAD.....no likes to put up with sites which send confirmatory mails after 18 hrs or so.
if all ur enrollments are manual, ENJOY
Re: Need to Tune Moodle Fast
One thing that I found helped immensely with performance was to have my host enable mod_gzip for my site. It cuts down greatly on bandwidth usage and helped to prevent timeouts.