Moodle is very slow

[blu4]

Hello,

 

I've recently configured moodle and got it working to a point where you can log in, connect to AD- the necessary steps. There is a problem- the VLE is very slow even though it's on our local domain. Going through settings it sometimes takes 30 seconds for a page to load. Same goes for editing pages, when I click "Turn editing on" it takes about 20 seconds. What could be the cause of this?

 

Moodle release is 2.7.3+ (Build: 20141112)

The host OS is Ubuntu 14.04.1 LTS

 

Thanks

[danbuntu]

What are the specs of the machine that it's hosted on?

 

Is it a physical box or a vm?

 

If you run 'top' or 'htop' can you see if the resources are maxed out?

[blu4]

Not sure what I'm looking for with the "top" command- I know linux a little bit. Moodle runs on a virtual machine. The host machine is crap- Dual Xeons (forgot the model name) and 28GB DDR2 ram.

 

[danbuntu]

I recommend you install htop it's much more readable and functional

 

However your top is showing that you have 2 gigs of ram of which 1 gig ish is free which is a good thing - although if you have lots of users connecting you might need to up this at a later date.

 

htop will show the state of the cpus better

 

next step then it to start looking in the logs

 

tail -f /var/log/syslog

 

will show you any server type issues when you're accesing the moodle

 

tail -f /var/log/apache2/error.log

 

will show you any apache errors

[blu4]

 

This is the syslog- can't figure out what's moaning about though...

[danbuntu]

I don't think it's moaning about anything - thats just maintenance cronjobs doing their thing

[unixman_again]

Download and install MySQL Workbench and connect it to your MySql instance. Have a look at the server status and see if InnoDB Buffer Usage is 100% (or near offer). If it is, all well and good. If not, you'll need to change one of the InnoDb variables. InnoDB variables and status explained.

[gaz350b]

Also make sure you have more than 1 cpu core assigned to the vm

[gshaw]

2GB RAM? How many users?

 

I'd recommend minimum 4GB, maybe 8GB if you're expecting many concurrent users.

 

https://docs.moodle.org/28/en/Performance_recommendations

 

Agree with the recommendation posted above, 2 vCPU will help.

 

Also what disks are you running the server (VM?) on? Bear in mind you've got a database sitting on there so fast write times are important. Basically you don't want it sitting on SATA disks, especially if they're on RAID6.

 

Also you need to make sure Apache, PHP etc. are tuned as per the recommendations above. You also need some sort of PHP accelerator enabled (think the new versions of PHP have one built in but double check on that) as it makes a huge difference to performance.

Edited February 25, 2015 by gshaw

[mrverrall]

Not related to performance, but you say you are running Moodle 2.7.3+

 

The current 2.7 branch release is 2.7.5 and included a critical security fix whereby access to system files could be gained, e.g. config files or moodle user uploads assignments etc.

See https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=279956 for details.

 

I'd suggest you patch up asap if you plan on putting this into production use!

 

Cheers,

Paul

[blu4]

Thanks for the replies- I'll get working on the suggestions. The moodle is still in beta and is only hosted locally (me and network manager only have access).