Load testing Moodle - 1000+ online users

[barnabythebear]

Hiya,

 

Not sure if this is a system or a Moodle question!

 

We normally have a welcome day for new studnets, but this year we will have to host in on one of our Moodles. My concern is that our system may not cope with 1000+ concurrent users, at best we usually have 60 or so concurrent users.

 

Is there a way to load test our system to make sure it can cope with this demand?? How should our servers be set up to cope with large numbers??

 

We use Virtual Servers running Centos7. Specs differ across our Moodles but typically 64 gig dual core machines.

 

Moodle has jmeter as an option but this can't be run on a production Moodle.

 

Thanks in advance,

 

Nige.

[Steve21]

Don’t think there’s anything built into Moodle really but the old tech specs have a suggestion:

 

“Very roughly, worst case, your Moodle site may only handle as few as 10-20 concurrent users per GB of memory. “

 

So on your figures could be 50-100GB depending which end it slides

 

https://docs.moodle.org/38/en/Performance_FAQ

 

There is an old test script on there too you might want to look at

 

Steve

[mavhc]

There's lots of load testing systems. Here's one using python https://locust.io/ and one with a recorder https://gatling.io/docs/current/quickstart#quickstart that uses Scala, for example

[unixman_again]

We regularly have 1000+ users on moodle. You'll need to fiddle in the php.ini file, specifically memory_limit (ours is 256M). Also look into MySql tuning. There is loads of info on the web.

[barnabythebear]

Hiya,

 

Thank you for the responses.

 

I have searched the topic but there are so many factors it's hard to choose those that will have the most impact (I'm not a systems expert by any means). I will certainly up the ram but I was wondering what impact php processing would have. We currently use php.fpm.

 

Thanks,

 

Nigel.

[pete]

Are all those users going to hit the system at once and stay using it for the whole day, or it is more staggered?

 

And do you know the tasks they'll be doing? Is it very interactive with lots of traffic back and forth, or more "read this page, click, read next page, agree to form"?

 

There's plugins such as this: https://moodle.org/plugins/report_benchmark

 

which might reveal any problems, but it won't give you an indicator of how it handles 1000 users at once.

[barnabythebear]

Hi Pete,

 

Thanks. It's not a course page packed with activities. It's more for information. There will be some video - not sure if we are using Moodles video capture or if we are going to recored video and put it up on our eStream account. What may be taxing is there will be a number of chat activities where prospective studnets can chat to a tutor. The plan is to have the page accessible for four hours on a particular day. We have the benchmark plugin but they seem to say things are OK.

 

Thanks,

 

Nigel.

[Steve21]

Do you actually need to use Moodle for this? From your comments about it not using the course sections etc of Moodle and if it's a one-day 4 hour situation, would it be easier to consider using a Cloud-based (365/Gsuite etc) style solution?

 

Obviously depends on the specifics, but might be easier option to consider as it'll remove the issue around hits etc And can host videos on either of those too

 

Steve

[barnabythebear]

Hiya Steve,

 

That's a possibility but staff are use to adding stuff to Moodle plus they want to be able to use Moodle's IM Chat activity to field questions.

 

Thanks,

 

Nigel.