Martin Dougiamas

It's a very rough number, simply because of the number of factors involved.  The number came from two estimates I got from two different sites which are very large, one was Open University (see Sam Marshall's response in this discussion too, he's also from OU).

A lot of what we did in Moodle 2.x was to make things faster.  The themes for example have heavily optimised caching.  Database access was streamlined, indexes improved.  Bottlenecks and memory hogs in cron were removed, etc.  On the other hand Moodle 2.x does a lot more stuff and has a lot more features.

Factors that would affect any estimate like this:

• Number of users / courses / activities
• Type and configuration of hardware
• Type and configiration of database/OS
• Number/type of integrations with other systems
• Caching systems
• Config settings for everything
• Distribution of user load
• Types of activities used
• etc

All of this can not boil down to any particular number.   Still it worries me to hear any reports like this from our friends and all I meant to say in the meeting was that we plan to focus on peformance and make as many gains as we can.  We appreciate help from all developers in this.

If you have a big site, there is no substitute for doing your own testing on a development site that is as close as possible to your production site - re-evaluate all the parameters and PLAN FOR FUTURE GROWTH because student usage does tend to increase over time.  Turn off features you don't need.  Experiment with caching settings.  You may need more hardware - this is just a reality.  Moodle 2 is a different beast and assumptions from Moodle 1 will not always apply.

The problem here is a misunderstanding.

You've used a "folder" resource to store your files in.  By default, yes, this is accessible by students - it's actually designed that way so that you can share a lot of files with students.

It is possible to prevent students accessing a folder activity - you just need to go into the permissions settings for that activity and remove students from some of the capabilities there.  This would prevent what you are seeing above.

Another way is to use your Private Files area for your files.

That's not true at all.  I've committed Moodle HQ resources to security fixes for 18 months for each release (it says that on the page you linked), and even beyond that we will integrate fixes that are backported by others in the community.  That's a lot of resources we are putting in.

If you want to have Moodle for free AND have old versions maintained for many years then consider putting something back into the project.

It's actually not all integrated yet, hence the delay.  I expect the release will be two weeks late too.

The main starting point for developing local plugins is here:

   http://docs.moodle.org/dev/Local_plugins

(We are keeping our code for this plugin private for the time being)