23 September 2010, 8:54

It's our first year running a live Mahara and we're having a lot of fun finding uses for it. Our students seem to love it, which makes it a really easy sell to staff.

Had a few problems with server load at the start of the week (we're running Moodle and Mahara on the same windows server). We managed to tweak around the problem and our server is running nicely now, so thought I'd share what we did in a shiny new Mahara view:

http://citybit.southampton-city.ac.uk/mahara/view/view.php?t=4xKhg9pu2KdqMemyzjrn

23 September 2010, 9:52

Assuming that your hardware is capable of taking the load, there should be no issue. There's certainly no technical reason why not.

We run Moodle and Mahara with > 250,000 users on the same set of servers. These all run Linux. There's a description of our rough architecture in a presentation my colleague gave 3 years ago - the service hasn't changed in any major way since then - http://www.slideshare.net/poltawski/moodle-moot-uk-07-presentation - slide 32 gives a quick overview of how we run the servers. We host > 1000 moodles and 2 maharas on the same set of equipment.

I'd much rather run web services (well any services really) under Linux than Windows, and I personally don't trust MySQL as far as I can throw it, but these are personal preferences.

Andrew

23 September 2010, 10:37

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for the info. Preferably I'd rather be running Linux servers instead of Windows but its new territory for us as a College. I'm sure we can convince the powers that be that its a good idea eventually. There main bone of contention is the expertise in-house if I deceided to leave the College.

I've been toying around with the idea of changing to Postgres from Mysql as I've read alot about improved reliabilty and performance recently.

The main annoyance I've found with the windows versions of Moodle and Mahara recently is that I can't get Mahoodle working no matter what I try.

Thanks again for the info, I'll have a look through the presentation now.

23 September 2010, 11:01

heh - one of my main reasons not to use MySQL is it's lack of reliability and the care-free way in which it stores your data ;) Postgres has always been far more reliable.

There shouldn't be any technical reason preventing you from networking your installation - it should work under Windows just as well as under Linux.

I'd check your Apache error logs for more information - what kind of error message are you seeing in the UI and error logs? I assume that your Moodle is also externally accessible so this shouldn't be a proxy issue.

Andrew