EastBaySchools.Net

Recently one of the teachers that I am supporting with moodle wrote me to inform me that moodle had failed miserably during a class quiz.

She enjoys it so much that she has made it central to her classroom management. However, my initial assumptions for supporting Moodle were to use it in a asynchronous mode - mostly for posting class notes, and providing a space for students to work from home.

For those of you that want to skip this article, the general consensus is that for realtime class activity of 30-40 students,
you should consider finding a computer with at least 4 gig of memory. Moodle can be a memory hog. For the rest of you, read on.

The concept of bottlenecks:

Before talking about solutions, lets look at where things could go wrong.

1) The server in this case is offsite, so anything in the network path could effect access and performance. It could be the routers in the building (the little box where all the wires and data meet, and try to figure out where to go next)

2) It could be the school's connection to the internet

3) It could be the moodles server's connection to the internet, or the routers between the moodle server and the internet.

4) It could be (probably in this case) the hardware or software configuration of the moodle server.

Always have a Plan B

One lesson that is learned as quickly in the classroom as in technology enabled endeavors, is to always have a plan B, especially when you aren't in full control of every aspect of the surrounding environment. If a planned lesson starts to go south, do you stay with it, or move on to something else? In technology, there is an old adage...

when the computer goes down, everything stands still.

Be prepared. Especially during initial deployment. Work through the problems, the results will payoff in the end.

Solution - The server configuration.

When you've eliminated all all other factors, next look at the hardware. Each student request, if it makes it to the server quickly, still has to get into the server (through a network card - usually at 10mb, 100mb or 1gb transfer speeds. Next it has to go out to disk and grab the information to send back to the student. Each request a few meg of memory depending on configuration, so having a lot of memory in the server is the best way to increase performance. The disks can affect performance as well, with SCSI always being faster than IDE. Tuning various system parameters will speed things up as well.

For more information, start with the moodle forum, found at:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/view.php?id=596.

An excellent benchmark for those getting started with large but reasonable school sites can be found here
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=68579

A good source for refurbished servers is UBID.. I just saw one posted for $645.
This was a HP Proliant DL380 G3 Dual P4/2.4GHz Xeon, 2GB RAM, 4 X 36GB HD. Be sure to look for systems that have plenty of room for extra memory, and that preferably have hot swap raid. This will allow you to replace a hard disk without turning off the computer, should something fail.