26 January 2010, 20:07

Our support company installed Mahara on our Moodle using single sign on. The moment more than 50 students tried to access Mahara the speeds dropped significantly and made it impossible to upload any further resources.

Our support company have suggested the following reason -

Since then we removed the single sign on and set up a direct log in to Mahara. This has not solved the problems and the situation is no better evenwith a class of 25. Does anyone have any ideas that might be causing this or further ways forward that we could take? We are doing some really innovative work with our 11yr old students who all have notebooks and access to a range of wonderful Moodle courses. However the moment they access Mahara they are now getting a very negative experience and our staff are getting very unhappy!

Many thanks

Gideon WIlliams
Director of e-learning

27 January 2010, 13:03

Dear Gideon,

Moodle is very demanding in term of RAM to login users. I don't think it is a good idea to have on the same machine Mahara and Moodle.

The best solution will be to have two separate servers, one for each service.

Where it is not possible, maybe these following advices could help:

• have your server on a Unix's server distribution instead of one with a GUI which use processor's time to run
• have as much RAM you can. My Moodle server has 2Gb or RAM to log about 100 users in the same time. Last year we only had 1Gb which was critical during our exam session where 95 students have to be seated in the same time
• tune your server reading the Moodel's tech note you can find here
• Use a cache system or PHP accelerator such as eAccelerator or Zend

27 January 2010, 18:45

TH a huge amount!

Although my knowledge is limited I had guessed that the two separate server approach might be the best way forward long term. Our support is predominantly for Moodle but we have tried to push the boat out a bit this year by asking for Google Docs links on Moodle and Mahara.

I have penciled in a dual server approach as we start to develop virtualisation model at our school. Just need to justify to our SMT that the initial expense will be justified longer term.

Many thanks for the ideas and taking the time to reply in such detail

Gid

15 March 2010, 13:02

Hi

One last point - it's probably better, if you're using two servers, to put moodle and mahara on one web server, and use the second server for the database.

The Apache/PHP part of Moodle and Mahara  will have different needs than the database part.  You also often want to have slightly different hardware for database servers than you do webservers.  Both need lots of RAM, but on a webserver CPU is more important, and generally on a database you care more about fast disks, if your database does not fit into memory.

You should also try using persistent connections. I don't have any clue how mysql handles this but if you are using postgres (recommended) then I have had very good results from pgpool.

And ram, ram, ram.