Sharepoint SLK

[Sunderwood]

We had a training session last week with 40 members of staff and we were showing them how to assign an assignment to students. Now for those who know SLK it then goes away and searching for everyone who is in the SLK learner group. When we asked 40 members of staff to try this the webserver crawled to a halt.

Is this normal? and have we got SLK setup correctly?

We have brand new Hp servers so server spec is not an issue...

cheers

[john]

How much ram has your server got, despite it being new it won't have 4GB probably which it will need, I know mine gobbles it up nicely.

[apearce]

redeploy your SLK install - it wont do anything to your database.

What version are you using of SLK - i currently recommend 1.3.0 from www.codeplex.com/slk but if you have the MLG version you need to stick with that one.

[olcinm]

4GB RAM for how many concurrent assignment processes? Looks like SLK may have some scaling issues for say an LA that wants to roll out MOSS 2007 and SLK across lots of schools (Say 300?)

I wonder if any of these services have really been tested for this kind of taffic. My experience says that ,most schools don't do the assignment stuff much yet but if they do start to use it alot then any learning platform that needs to scale up to LA size needa architecture that separates out the process to different schools etc.

Hosted solutions that aggregate schools like UniServity, RM Kaleidos Portal Plus, StudyWiz could really struggle with assignment handling in a school setting where everyone wants to set up timed stuff at fixed times during the day. We all know how the log in or printing struggles without load balancing DCs and localised printer servers.

Perhaps currently there's not much of this happening on their servers and perhaps there never will? I think the vision for an on-line, any time anywhere on-line learning space for kids with ePortfolios that take multimedia and on-line assessments that use multimedia will have to really get the architecture right the more we centralise.

Maybe we shouldn't be centralising and Moodle on the LAN with Moodle networking peer to peer is best after all?

[torledo]

4GB RAM for how many concurrent assignment processes? Looks like SLK may have some scaling issues for say an LA that wants to roll out MOSS 2007 and SLK across lots of schools (Say 300?)

I wonder if any of these services have really been tested for this kind of taffic. My experience says that ,most schools don't do the assignment stuff much yet but if they do start to use it alot then any learning platform that needs to scale up to LA size needa architecture that separates out the process to different schools etc.

Hosted solutions that aggregate schools like UniServity, RM Kaleidos Portal Plus, StudyWiz could really struggle with assignment handling in a school setting where everyone wants to set up timed stuff at fixed times during the day. We all know how the log in or printing struggles without load balancing DCs and localised printer servers.

Perhaps currently there's not much of this happening on their servers and perhaps there never will? I think the vision for an on-line, any time anywhere on-line learning space for kids with ePortfolios that take multimedia and on-line assessments that use multimedia will have to really get the architecture right the more we centralise.

Maybe we shouldn't be centralising and Moodle on the LAN with Moodle networking peer to peer is best after all?

There's a lot of microsoft documentation regarding server architecture best practice, and as sharepoint is a primarly an intranet technology there's no doubt best practice design guidelines on building server farms or clustered MOSS solutions for large installations.

I'd imagine most LA's or providers offering a MOSS solution will be using lots of blades or serveral 4 socket boxes, intel have basically stronged arm server buiders into restricting x86 64-bit architectures to 4 socket boxes, there are a few 8 socket boxes.....but hardly any servers running windows 2003 x64 datacenter edition servers with more than 8 sockets. 8 and above is the domain of the itanium. So it begs the question if an LA doesn't have a 16 socket itanium box that they can allocate significant processor and storage resources for MOSS then how best to deploy a centrally hosted solution ? I'm not even sure MOSS can run on windows 2003 for itanium.

It's an interesting question you pose regarding scalability, but LA's have deployed nuemours microsoft server technologies on a centrally hosted basis - MOSS is probably something unique they've not encountered in a previous deployment, but i'm sure there has to be design guidelines for hosted deployments and scaling for no. of concurrent users.