Quiz

Apache Settings

As an appendix to our main report above, here are some apache settings that may be useful reference. In compiling our build, we tried to limit the number of modules installed to make apache as light as possible. You can see the modules included below. You should not copy these settings directly as many of them relate to our specific hardware and software. Use as a guide. Also, we do not know exactly why our quiz operation results were so good, so if you notice a particular setting that could explain why we had good success, please tell us here. Thanks! Don

Basic Data

[root@elearning conf]# /usr/local/apache2/bin/httpd -V
Server version: Apache/2.0.59
Server built: Mar 2 2007 15:43:17
Server's Module Magic Number: 20020903:12
Server loaded: APR 0.9.12, APR-UTIL 0.9.12
Compiled using: APR 0.9.12, APR-UTIL 0.9.12
Architecture: 32-bit
Server compiled with....
-D APACHE_MPM_DIR="server/mpm/prefork"
-D APR_HAS_SENDFILE
-D APR_HAS_MMAP
-D APR_HAVE_IPV6 (IPv4-mapped addresses enabled)
-D APR_USE_SYSVSEM_SERIALIZE
-D APR_USE_PTHREAD_SERIALIZE
-D SINGLE_LISTEN_UNSERIALIZED_ACCEPT
-D APR_HAS_OTHER_CHILD
-D AP_HAVE_RELIABLE_PIPED_LOGS
-D HTTPD_ROOT="/usr/local/apache2"
-D SUEXEC_BIN="/usr/local/apache2/bin/suexec"
-D DEFAULT_PIDLOG="logs/httpd.pid"
-D DEFAULT_SCOREBOARD="logs/apache_runtime_status"
-D DEFAULT_LOCKFILE="logs/accept.lock"
-D DEFAULT_ERRORLOG="logs/error_log"
-D AP_TYPES_CONFIG_FILE="conf/mime.types"
-D SERVER_CONFIG_FILE="conf/httpd.conf"


httpd.conf

<IfModule prefork.c>
StartServers 50
MinSpareServers 5
MaxSpareServers 20
ServerLimit 300
MaxClients 300
MaxRequestsPerChild 4000

</IfModule>
# KeepAlive: Whether or not to allow persistent connections (more than
KeepAlive Off
# MaxKeepAliveRequests: The maximum number of requests to allow
MaxKeepAliveRequests 100
# KeepAliveTimeout: Number of seconds to wait for the next request
KeepAliveTimeout 15


#Modules

LoadModule access_module modules/mod_access.so
LoadModule auth_module modules/mod_auth.so
LoadModule auth_anon_module modules/mod_auth_anon.so
LoadModule auth_dbm_module modules/mod_auth_dbm.so
LoadModule auth_digest_module modules/mod_auth_digest.so
LoadModule ext_filter_module modules/mod_ext_filter.so
LoadModule include_module modules/mod_include.so
LoadModule log_config_module modules/mod_log_config.so
LoadModule env_module modules/mod_env.so
LoadModule expires_module modules/mod_expires.so
LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so
LoadModule setenvif_module modules/mod_setenvif.so
LoadModule mime_module modules/mod_mime.so
LoadModule dav_module modules/mod_dav.so
LoadModule status_module modules/mod_status.so
LoadModule autoindex_module modules/mod_autoindex.so
LoadModule asis_module modules/mod_asis.so
LoadModule info_module modules/mod_info.so
LoadModule cgi_module modules/mod_cgi.so
LoadModule dav_fs_module modules/mod_dav_fs.so
LoadModule vhost_alias_module modules/mod_vhost_alias.so
LoadModule negotiation_module modules/mod_negotiation.so
LoadModule dir_module modules/mod_dir.so
LoadModule imap_module modules/mod_imap.so
LoadModule actions_module modules/mod_actions.so
LoadModule speling_module modules/mod_speling.so
LoadModule userdir_module modules/mod_userdir.so
LoadModule alias_module modules/mod_alias.so
LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so
LoadModule php5_module modules/libphp5.so

Thanks for sharing this data with us. Very interesting.

There are known problems with with the library we use for Excel export and Unicode, and sadly, it seems there is no easy answer.

I don't know why the item analysis report is failing. Well, presumably it is trying to process too much data with an algorithm that is not efficient enough, but I have never looked into that report in detail, and I am not likely to have enough time to do so now. Sorry.

Hi Don .... nice to see you still plugging away with it all.   Great work and it does set the example of reporting on system configs and performance.

It would have been an interesting exercise Don to have split the groups into 2 x 150 and done this on 2 different server configurations, say the Windows box you have and say a single processor Linux box or even windows box and look at the comparisons.  It would have been interesting to see a comparison also on the cluster we have down here  - from the 2005 Aust Moodle conference.  

Anyway a GREAT report Don.  

Hello,
Having done some work and bugfix in the past on the item analysis report, I am interested to look at the problem.
The first version of this report has a lot of problem when student's number increased but I was thinking that this problem was solved when bugs MDL-4303 and MDL-4345 were resolved.
So can I ask :

• if any other Moodle user has problem with item analysis report and a lot of students
• if you can look at your mod/quiz/report/analysis/report.php file version and report it here

The problem for me is that I don't really have "big" quizes to study the problem (my biggest quiz has 92 students and 177 attempts and the item analysis report is loading in less than 3 seconds on a shared server).
Of course, item analysis will always be slower than overview or responses because there is a lot more work to do.

For the Excel download problem there is currently only 2 solutions
- switch to english (or another isolatin, french is fine too ) language as already suggested (provided the $CFG->latinexcelexport setting is set to true)
- use ODS export (Moodle 1.8 new feature)