Moodle server specs?

[localzuk]

I've been tasked with getting rough ideas of pricing for a million and one things we get via our LEA.

 

One of them is our VLE. We currently have Fronter, but we need some idea of competing costs.

 

So, one of the options is to host a Moodle install internally. If we were to do this, what sort of spec server would be looking at needing? We have about 600 kids, 40 staff etc... Not heavily used at the moment, but it might be eventually...

[TronXP]

Installing Moodle - MoodleDocs

Disk space: 160MB free (min). You will require more free space to store your teaching materials.

Memory: 256MB (min), 1GB (recommended). The general rule of thumb is that Moodle can support 50 concurrent users for every 1GB of RAM, but this will vary depending on your specific hardware and software combination.

This includes hosting limits of PHP or MySQL on a hosting service.

The capacity can limit the number of users your Moodle site can handle. See User site capacities

 

 

Ours from memory has 2x Dual Core Xenons and around 12Gb RAM for amount of users it should have 18Gb, but its just not used heavily enough at the moment, we have roughly 900 users, I've never seen more than 100 or so on at the same time though. Early days still though.

[Soulfish]

We've got a pretty heavily used Moodle install (1100 students, 100 staff) and run it entirely from 2 VMs. 1 for Apache, 1 for MySQL. Took the decision to split them when we first deployed so it'd be easier to expand in the future . Both run 2 vCPUs and 4gb RAM with CentOS as the OS of choice. Performance is fast and snappy.

 

You could probably run it quite happily on a single Linux VM with 4gb RAM, or a very basic Dell R210/HP DL160 if needed.

[Guest Guest]

We've currently got it on a HP G3 server with a dual CPU (single core iirc) with 4gb ram, and lots of HDs. Performance isn't as snappy as it was when it was virtualised (dont ask) but it is perfectly usable, certainly faster than the likes of facebook. Concurrant users; 50 maybe.

 

If it isnt heavily used anything you can buy now will be fine. 4gb ram with a few disks, and any current CPU.

[danIT]

As with most server setups alot is going to depend on concurrency and user habits. For instance if your doing lots of quizzes you'll probably find your servers get hammered when a classroom submits there quiz answers.

 

In my opinion dont try and over optimise from the start, use TronXP's response as your starting point. Then add additional hardware as and when its required, my personal perference would be to have 2 web servers, 2 DB's and a single file server with a decent backup procedure. Yeah you can probably run a Moodle instance on a single box, but if you actually want users to be able to relie on it then the system needs to be reliable and resiliant.

[KarlGoddard]

Waking up an old thread... but just browsed to it

 

Ram is everything with Moodle. Disks next then cpu.

 

For that number of potential users, you'd easily do it from a single box. But the post that mentioned 2 VMs - 1 db, 1 web - is totally spot on about having the option to expand. Hindsight, i wished I'd separated them for that very reason.

 

You wouldn't need any form of load balancing or db pooling for <700 users - so having 5 servers like mentioned in another post is ridiculous.

 

I have a Moodle of 700+ course pages, and 3000 accounts and had 212 concurrent users all doing assignments / activities as part of an FICT thing - my server didn't go above 20% cpu and 60% ram util. My server is a 6 year old dell, 2 xeons and 12gb of ram and 1 tb raid - not the fastest server in world

 

The key to having a nice zippy moodle is php / mysql config and caching your php using something like memcache. Look after your php and you wont have any performance issues!