Martin Dougiamas

See my post about the Beta status:  Moodle 2.3 (almost).

I'm hoping we can wrap it up in a week!

Please see Moodle News now

It's fine for testing.  The remaining issues are almost entirely cosmetic.

I suggest you start here and come back if you have more questions. 

   http://docs.moodle.org/22/en/Performance_recommendations

I'm glad you enjoy Moodle 1.9 - it's still there for you to use for as long as you like, as is Moodle 1.1. 

That said I think Moodle 2.3 is the easiest to use yet.

If you have a lot of files like that it should be in a repository. The simplest external repository would be the Filesystem, try it out. Basically a folder on the server (which you can map to a network share, or access via FTP if you wish, etc).