Peter Ruthven-Stuart

My moodle (version 1.5.2) is hosted on a private shared server. Everytime my students access the site (http://moodle.petesweb.org) at the same time they get a red-screened "CPU QUOTA EXCEEDED" message. This happens even when only 10 or so students access the site. They then have to wait, a few minutes and are then able to access the site, but a few minutes later the message invariably reappears, often it seems when many of them all try to do the same thing at the same time.

I have written to my hosting company about this and they replied:

"It's also possible that there is a script (php or otherwise) which is not terminating properly which could be taking up resources. Other than that you can try optimizing your databases."

So, is it possible that there is a php script within moodle that is not 'terminating properly'? I have a feeling that it is a server problem and not a moodle problem, but would like to see if anyone out there can suggest any moodle php files that may be possible causes of the problem.

I have not made any changes to php files, apart from some of the theme files.
I believe that the following directives in the php.ini can have a significant effect on the perfromance of moodle - they have been set as follows:

and in the config.php file:

$CFG->dbpersist =  true

I've also tried 'false' for this last one, but no change.

Any advice or suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

As you can see from Mike C's reply it is not possible for students to see the results of a questionnaire via a questionnaire 'activity'. However, one workaround that I use is to save the results as a PDF and then upload the PDF to the course page, which the students can then view. Certainly, not an ideal solution, but it works. 

I have been having problems backing up courses containing Questionnaires. I searched the Questionnaire forum and found that in July, someone else had had the same problem:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=27652

and it was suggested that the newer version had fixed the problem. However, I just downloaded the latest Questionnaire zip from the downloads page, uploaded it to my moodle, and still have the same problem of restores failing if the Questionnnaire module is included.

I just checked the version.php file of this 'latest' version and it says:

<?PHP // $Id: version.php,v 1.14 2005/10/06 16:14:40 mchurch Exp $

/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
///  Code fragment to define the version of NEWMODULE
///  This fragment is called by moodle_needs_upgrading() and /admin/index.php
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////

$module->version  = 2005062701;  // The current module version (Date: YYYYMMDDXX)
$module->requires = 2005031000;  // The current module version (Date: YYYYMMDDXX)
$module->cron     = 0;           // Period for cron to check this module (secs)

So I appear to have the latest version, but it doesn't seem to have fixed the restore problem. Any suggestions will be much appreciated. Thank you.

I'm using moodle 1.5.2

Geoff

Tim wrote, "I think that you should set it to english, Geoff. It will use the en\ja language which is a dummy (empty) language pack which just sets the encoding to Japanese but the GUI is defaulted to the old english language pack. "

With my moodle I set the language to [English - EUC-JP (en_jp)]. If I don't, any Japanese becomes mojibake. Here's my moodle - try it:
http://moodle.petesweb.org/

You wrote that, "it doesn't come up as one of the language choices". I think that is because in the Variables settings for your moodle (click on Configuration then Variables) you have an option to turn 'langcache' on or off. This item is the 4th from the top. If 'langcache' is set to [Yes], you'll not be able to see any newly added language packs, or at least not straight away. So select [No], then save the change, then go back to variables and select [English - EUC-JP (en_jp)] as the site language, then I think you can safely turn the 'langcache' back to [Yes].

Hope this helps.

I am interested in any development of moodle that would allow the sharing of activities between courses.

First of all, just a quick note about terminology. Joao wrote, "How can a module "belong" to more than one course?", I think you mean, how can 'activities' belong to more than course. Modules are the things that you use to make activities. Anyway, I see two possible versions of a 'sharing of activities' feature:

1) Activities could be copied into other courses. At the moment this is possible via the backup and restore feature. However, it would make things much easier if it were possible for a teacher to, for example, click on 'Quiz' in the 'Add an activity ...' menu, and then be faced with a list existing quizzes, one of which could be chosen, and thereby copied into the course as a completely new quiz. With this version of the 'sharing of activities' feature, the copied activity would become a completely new activity, independent from the original. So in the case of Quizzes, the results would be completely separate.

2) The second version of the 'sharing of activities' feature would be just that - sharing. A teacher would in effect be creating a link to an activity that existed in another course. By making this link, students would automatically be given access rights to that activity, but not to any other activities in the originating course. Using the example of a Quiz, a teacher would click on 'Quiz' in the 'Add an activity ...' menu, and then be faced with a list existing quizzes, one of which could be chosen. Unlike the above scenario, instead of copying the quiz to make a new one, this selection process would in fact be creating a link to the original quiz. Thus, the results and other data would not be separate, they'd be stored on the original results database set up for the original quiz.

I imagine that from a programming point of view, option 1 would be much easier to set up. Option 2 would be wonderful, but I'm sure is rather complicated, and potentially contains a number of problems as mentioned by Tim (see above).