What server spec are you using to run Moodle?

[localzuk]

Thought I'd ask this on here as its just a little unclear elsewhere on the web.

 

If you are running Moodle, please can you answer these questions:

 

1. How many users concurrently use the system at peak?

2. How much RAM do you have assigned to the system?

3. What CPU/how many cores do you have assigned to the system?

4. Do you have SSL enabled/forced for the whole site?

[Cache]

Ours is quite a small VM to be honest with you.

 

1. I know we've had 60 users runing across both IT rooms and the server didn't seem to skip a beat and I quizzed the teachers after and they said there were no issues. vmWare statistics just reported a bit of RAM pressure so I increased that.

2. 1GB RAM on Ubuntu

3. 2vCPU

4. Not currently, but I'm looking to move across to it.

[Marci]

1 - Peak concurrent, 600 users

2 - 16Gb

3 - 4x 2Ghz vCPU

4 - No, Only at login.

 

MySQL is handed off to a separate dedicated MySQL server with a dedicated 10Gb link, same spec but running Ubuntu (the one above runs CentOS / WHM / cPanel). Both servers are virtualised.

[Oaktech]

1. How many users concurrently use the system at peak? 30

2. How much RAM do you have assigned to the system? Range from 4gb-8gb

3. What CPU/how many cores do you have assigned to the system? 1 cpu, 4 cores

4. Do you have SSL enabled/forced for the whole site? No, it's not externally accessible

[mrverrall]

I think people wildly over estimate their concurrency. The largest setup I'm involved with is too complex to define in terms of the 4 criteria listed here, but I can give some statistics regarding concurrency,

 

Over the last Month we saw ~14k unique users log in.

Over the last 24 hours 8k unique user logins.

In terms of concurrency, defined as users with activity within 5 mins of each other, our absolute max is just below 300 users.

 

I just thought that might be interesting.

Edited May 12, 2015 by mrverrall

[localzuk]

A system like that which you are discussing @mrverrall is very different to how a school uses a VLE. Concurrency is very easy to figure out in a school - how many ICT suites, trolleys of laptops etc... will be in use, connected to and using the VLE at a single time.

 

So, here, we have 3 ICT suites and a set of 30 tablets, totalling 135 devices. Looking at the timetable, I can safely say that there are several times each week when all of these devices will be using Moodle - as Moodle is used in class time in the subjects timetabled.

 

Universities/Colleges don't use their VLEs in this way as far as I can tell.

[mjk]

1) About 1000 unique logins per day. Difficult to say the number of concurrent connections. It isn't that simple to calculate. probably about 700 concurrent.

2) 16GB

3) 4 virtual cpu's/cores (Intel® Xeon® CPU E5-2620 0 @ 2.00GHz)

4) yes ssl all over.

[mrverrall]

Yeah, I agree for sure usage patterns will be different. In the context of system resources what I think we really care about is how many users are likely to be clicking stuff at any one time and I think it is safe to say in either usage context that this is actually going to be much much lower than the total users logged in at any one time. Here we graph not only the users logged in, but more importantly the number with near 'lastaccess' times in the user table. The latter is much more informative when you are deciding what resources to throw at your system.

 

Interestingly what I have tended to find when inheriting the maintenance of schools existing moodles is once I start graphing their system resources it's fairly apparent that at some point they have decided to throw lots of RAM at the server without actually configuring anything to use it, the moral of the story being to understand your systems real resource usage and take care it it's configuration. RAM is great, but worthless if unused

 

Sorry to take us off topic

Edited May 12, 2015 by mrverrall