13 September 2009, 14:00

Hi,

Mahara seems to be an interesting software and I wanted to test it because we support and are working with a great variety of OS software systems on the web as an independent Open Source software consultant.

I downloaded Mahara to test on my local xampp server, windows, apache, mysql, php and perl. Most of the installation went fine but it got stucked on Curl. I would like to test Mahara but I also wonder if it is any meaning to do it.

Our online servers are Linux and meet the requirements for Mahara. We can use Curl. But I am very hesitating to run cron jobs every minute. There are some heavy traffic sites on the server and I think if we run cron jobs that often it will more or less kill the server. Is there any other way?

I don't think RSS is so important for what I have in mind. Is there any way to exclude this?

Thanks for a nice software.

Tom

13 September 2009, 23:39

Hi - the cron job doesn't actually do that much. For example, it will only scrape rss feeds every half hour anyway, and most of that time is spent waiting for the feed to download. The cron job needs to be triggered every minute, but it doesn't always do heaps of work on every run.

If you don't run the cron, you'll miss out on forum post emails and other such stuff, that will reduce the experience for the users. 

The average load of the cronjob would be like having one extra page load every minute. If your servers can't handle that, you're in trouble . Just run with it, and see what happens. You could nice it if you really wanted to, but I don't think that would be necessary. 

15 September 2009, 2:05

Hi, Thanks for your reply. I know that my wondering was a bit silly but I run and adserver on the same server and the maintenance is done by cron jobs and it is quite heavy load on the server. But that one runs every hour so I guess this will work fine. But I would like to run Mahara on my development server - Xampp - that doesn't have cron or curl. It is on Windows. Is it possible?

 I want to create a site, a community where people looking for jobs can take part in the community and add their resume. From what I can see from the Mahara demo I think this is possible with Mahara and I wanted to test it in my development environment to see what can be done. I like the eportofolio touch and also the connection to Moodle. I just have to figure out how this can be done. What do you think?

15 September 2009, 20:34

Hi - I'm not sure how you do scheduled jobs on windows, but I think there is a task scheduler program? You might be able to use that. Moodle users might know better as Moodle runs on windows, or maybe the Moodle documentation might have instructions?

I think your intended use of Mahara fits quite nicely - note Mahara doesn't include anything like a "job board", but people can build and display CVs, which'll be useful. 

15 September 2009, 22:20

yeah - good docs here on how to create a cron job on windows - you can use the windows service package, or a scheduled task

http://docs.moodle.org/en/Cron#Managing_Cron_on_Windows_systems

16 September 2009, 2:46

Thanks for you help Nigel and Dan. I appreciate it. Yeah, I know about to schedule tasks in Windows, I was more concerned about the server load on my online server. Guess that will be ok so I will give it a try.

 I followed a link to Mahara's website and found it quite interesting right away and got a few ideas. I'm based in Singapore and I think a job community would fit in quite well here. See if I can get it going on my spare time. Thanks for your help guys.