**Results were excellent**—details below. A following post gives some software settings on our LAMP server.
Quiz Module Configuration:
- 50 multiple choice questions with 34 audio files (sizes ranging from 50kb to 1mb)
- submit once at end (no submission after each question)
- shuffled answers, no timer, no other special settings
- button for “Save without Submitting” disabled (see hack on this forum)
Quiz Administration
- Five 60 minute sessions, twenty minute breaks between for rebooting
- Up to 300 students logged in together over a one minute period (highest load)
- Submitted answers individually over final 20 minutes.(not so high load)
Server & Network Hardware
- 100MB LAN connections (all inside campus)
- Dell SC1420 Server, 2.8ghz Dual Xeon, US$1800 including memory upgrade
- 4GB memory, 80GB IDE hard disk
Client Software & Hardware
- Windows 2000Professional with Internet Explorer 6
- 600mhz Celeron CPU, 256MB memory
Server Software
- Linux: CentOS 4
- Apache 2.0.59 (complied from source code)
- MySQL-server-standard-4.1.22-0.rel4(rpm)
- PHP 5.2.1 with eAccelerator 0.95
Client Operation Times
- Remote booting time took about 5 minutes with batch program to load IE & Moodle
- Moodle login time: about 5-10 seconds
- Quiz opening time: less than 2 seconds
- Quiz saving time: 3-5 seconds
Quiz Scores and Analysis
- Excel Download from Overview **Failed**—only first 50-100 processed, 70% of data missing/corrupted. Perhaps the script was unable to handle 500+ records, or unable to handle double byte characters.
- Workaround: Text Download from Overview was OK, which was then converted to Excel manually.
- Item Analysis **Failed**: got this error message... Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /usr/moodle/ptest17/question/type/multichoice/questiontype.php on line 29
- Any advice on how to overcome these two problems would be appreciated.
System load, Memory usage, Apache processes
- see linked document here
- these results show that our system could potentially handle over 1000 simultaneous users with audio files