Slow Moodle in Virtual Environment

Slow Moodle in Virtual Environment

by Andrew Eickstead -
Number of replies: 1

I am trying to get Moodle online and when my network admin got it online we realized it is extremely slow.  I posted this in the Windows server forum, but thought I would try here also.  I received this e-mail from him:

The Moodle WEB site is over 100 times slower than www.lhssa.org. This can be due to many problems, the four that come to mind are:

- Bad firewall

- DNS problems

- Server problems

- Product problems

I eliminated the firewall as the culprit buy redirecting the Moodle page through both the Cisco and Linksys firewalls. Both were equally slow, about 4 minutes to load.

DNS can not be the problem since we are accessing with the IP address, bypassing the DNS servers.

A server problem is possible. How difficult is it to reload Moodle on a different server? After I migrated this server to a new virtual host it became very unstable. If this is an option, I can have a new virtual server set up tomorrow night and you can load Moodle and copy your WEB pages over from the old server.

As for product problems, Moodle or Apache may have issues with virtual servers. If this is an issue, I can set up a physical server but not before this weekend.

Here is some more information on our system.

OS: Windows Server 2003 R2 SP1

Database: MySQL

Virtual Server: VMware ESX 3.5

Host: Quad Zeon with 8Gb memory

System runs good across 100Mb full duplex network. Outside connectivity very slow on dedicated T1 (1.5Mb).

lhssa.org WEB site runs fast with IIS. Moodle WEB site very slow with Apache.

Each site uses separate firewalls. Swapped firewalls, problem follows Moodle WEB site.

Any help getting our site up to speed would be greatly apprectiated. 

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In reply to Andrew Eickstead

Re: Slow Moodle in Virtual Environment

by Jonathan Moore -
I can confirm that Moodle will work in an VMWare ESX setup. I think however most of the times we have done this we have gone with a Linux based VM on the ESX. But I don't think there is anything inherently incompatible with Moodle and VMWare.

I would be inclined to still look more into a firewall issue. Even with two different firewalls, it is possible that it is some interaction with the typology. One way to test this is to turn on the performance debugging in Moodle Site Admin. You will need to use one of the standard themes built into Moodle for this to display. Once enabled you will want to compare the page build times reported in the footer of each page against the actually page load times on the client. If there is a large variation this is generally the result of a network layer problem. If the slow load times are reflected in the performance results then you know you need to focus on the way the VM Moodle instance is setup rather than the network.

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