New Installation/requirements question

New Installation/requirements question

by Chad Parmentier -
Number of replies: 4

I have been using moodle since 1.5 and have recently encouraged the college I work at to use moodle. My experiance with moodle has been on a small scale so I have a couple quetions.

1. Is it difficult to tie into the LDAP server that contains usernames and passwords? This server is on site while we will be hosting moodle off site.

2. Our college as approximately 1500 users/students that would be using this installation. Would this be considered a large/medum/small installation? And how much server power would any of you recommend. we are currently looking at a P4 HT 3.4GHZ dedicated server with 1mb Ram and 200GB SATAII hard drive. We will also have an additional 300GB storage on another hosted server for media. Will this suffice for 1500 users.

Thank you for any advise/help/answers, Greatly appreciated.

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In reply to Chad Parmentier

Re: New Installation/requirements question

by Visvanath Ratnaweera -
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Q1. Short answer: No, it is not difficult to authenticate from an external LDAP server.

Long answer: http://docs.moodle.org/en/LDAP_authentication and there's a whole forum dedicated to "User Authentication" http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=42

Q2. The number of users is the wrong figure to estimate server load. As you can guess, the server feels only the intensity of usage, measured in number of concurrent users. If that has a peak, you have to build the server for the peak (unfortunately).

I'm not aware of any categorization on size, my very rough guess would be
- < 1000 small
- > 1000 < 5000 lower medium
- > 5000 < 10000 upper medium
- > 10000 large

The hardware doesn't tell the whole story. The operating system, the other software components (web-server, database server, PHP, Moodle), caching (database and PHP) and fine tuning of those components matter a lot.

You'll find a lot discussions and useful hints in this forum. Here is a summary for the impatientwink http://docs.moodle.org/en/Performance

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In reply to Chad Parmentier

Re: New Installation/requirements question

by Samuli Karevaara -
With only 1Gb the memory will be a bottleneck. Go for 2 Gb at least.
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Re: New Installation/requirements question

by Chad Parmentier -
Thanks that should help.
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Re: New Installation/requirements question

by Ken Wilson -
We have a similar setup (1500 users, we consider ourselves to be medium-sized) and will be upgrading to 4GB RAM soon owing to some very large tmp tables generated by mysql. Storage was initially 100GB, but we'll be adding another 500GB to cope with anticipated demand as more students upload their e-portfolio assignments into moodle.
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