Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

by Maria B. -
Number of replies: 7

We need some sort of ad hock web server that will host our Moodle application. Server will be online once a week, cca 6 hour (we have 4 groups and 25 students in each of them -> 105 users totally). Every group has his term (a hour and half) during it students (25 of them in the same time) do their tests (using quiz modul).

I need to know what is minimal hardware requirements for this (CPU, RAM, HDD speed and so).

Thank you in advance.

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In reply to Maria B.

Re: Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

by Arnor Kristjansson -
Quiz can be very heavy on mysql.

You _could_ get by with a cheap server like HP's DL140G2 and 3GB of RAM running Linux.

you would have to tune the machien of course...
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In reply to Maria B.

Re: Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
In other words you are looking for a server which can sustain 25 simultanous users taking tests.

As others have pointed out the quiz module is heavy on sql usage. My rough guess is a current state of art machine, Intel or AMD, ~3 GHz, 2 GB RAM running the default Moodle installation on Linux can handle the load.

This is of course not "minimal" but that depends on how much you can pay in time and know-how on tuning. If you go through this forum you'll see tricks on how to save RAM (lighttpd) or CPU
(php cache) etc.
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In reply to Visvanath Ratnaweera

Re: Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

by Arnor Kristjansson -
I saw a major speedboost going from 2GB of RAM to 3GB, though I wasn't using lighttpd on that server
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In reply to Arnor Kristjansson

Re: Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Translators
I believe that the general advice here "more RAM the better" holds.

If I unterstood the OP correctly he is looking for _minimal_ hardware. Apart from figuring out what really "minimal" means, the following questions have to be answered before deducting anything from your server to the OPs:

- Was your server too slow for a 25 users simultanously taking a test?

- Was it fast enough after going to 3 GB?

- What was the memory foot print of a single Apache process?

- How many Apache processes were running concurrently, the max. I mean?

- What was the memory usage like?

- Was it too slow because it was swapping or was the database the bottle neck?
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In reply to Maria B.

Re: Minimal hardware requirements for Moodle

by Ralph Patterson -
I'm curious as to what hardware configuration you decided upon. While I don't recommend this, I have 60 students, 25 max at one time on a PIII 800MHz Intel box with 256M of ram, 80 gig HD, running Edubuntu 6.10 at run level 5, the latest stable versions of PHP5, MySQL and eAccelerator.

I plan on building a new AMD X2 box with a couple gig of ram as my next platform.
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