Alain Raap

Ken I agree with you. Andrew, unless you're just 'playing' to take a look at a Moodle installation I would ask advice from your IT department. Installation of Moodle in a Redhat environment isn't an easy job, I know myself, because it took a long time for me to understand Moodle and get it working finally. If you make wrong decisions at the beginning (hardware, network, software integration), you'll pay the price when you've got a Moodle instance running and you run into (performance) problems or networking problems! Just a tip, take time to investigate what you need for your Moodle instance, and not to run in these pitfalls I just mentioned.

Did you install server api php-fpm?
You can check your installed php packages with yum list installed | grep php7x (x=2 in your case)
Your installed packages should begin with rh-php7x

Do you know this query? To check out the overall size of the DB

SELECT engine, count(*) as TABLES, concat(round(sum(table_rows)/1000000,2),'M') rows, concat(round(sum(data_length)/(1024*1024*1024),2),'G') DATA, concat(round(sum(index_length)/(1024*1024*1024),2),'G') idx, concat(round(sum(data_length+index_length)/ (1024*1024*1024),2),'G') total_size, round(sum(index_length)/sum(data_length),2) idxfrac FROM information_schema.TABLES WHERE table_schema not in ('mysql', 'performance_schema', 'information_schema') GROUP BY engine ORDER BY sum(data_length+index_length) DESC LIMIT 10;

Hi Rob,

I'm not familiar with Moodle on Windows Azure, but running the (automated) backup is a processor intensive task indeed.
We are running our Moodle instance on Redhat Linux + MariaDB database+data on a separate server with 8 CPU's and now
96GB memory for the database. We also had problems to tune this process and with a lot of courses, it takes a lot of time.
What is the number of courses backup-ed?
Things to look at are the temporary backup folder (fast enough FS?), load balancing and caching (do you use a caching server
on your Ubuntu OS?), just to name a few.
Ken Task wrote some good articles about the backup proces here in the forums, just have a look at them I can only say.
Maybe this thread can give you some insight, I had problems myself with the automated backup:
https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=383012

I had three broken automated backup runs because of corrupted Moodle course backups, after removing these backups after every run from the backup folder I now have the automated backup running for all courses again. Also new courses are added to the backup table mdl_backup_courses again.