Yes, we solved the problem. Thank you for asking.
Here is what happened. Despite the stoppage one year ago, my school forgave me and agreed to let us proceed full-scale and do an English placement test (Moodle Quiz Module, ver 1.4.4 with 30 audio questions) this past April 2005 for all 1100 entering freshmen to our university. If you see my report up above, you will notice in April 2004, I used a single slow Mac as a server--and yes, the other thread shows us OS X and MySQL don't love each other so well. This is what we did to make our test a complete success.
- switched to cheap Linux servers (see specs below)
- divided the students into 5 sessions of up to 250 students each
- used four servers (one server per 55 students)
Here are the server specs and some other notes--each server cost US$1500 back in March 2005.
- Dell small business server--no OS, no monitor/keyboard
- Dual Xeon 2.8ghz CPU
- 2GB Memory
- 80GB hard drive
- Internal LAN--servers in another building on campus
- Fedora Core 1, Apache 2.0.50, PHP 4.3.1, MySQL 4.1.10a
- Ioncube PHP accelerator for PHP 4.3.0