The document outlines the background of Moodle hosting, detailing the extensive usage of over 3000 hosted sites and 12 million accounts since 2004. It discusses best practices for server setup, including performance testing tools like JMeter, and emphasizes the importance of monitoring and alert systems. Additionally, it provides technical tips for optimizing server performance and managing databases effectively.

1. Jonathan Moore
CTO and Vice President RL-UK

2. Koen Roggernans
IT Manager Sint-Ritacollege

3. RL Background and Context
●
Over 3000 hosted Moodle sites
●
Over 12 million registered Moodle
accounts
●
Over 2,000,000 Moodle courses
●
Hosting Moodle sites since 2004
●
Virtualized Infrastructure

4. Sint-Ritacollege Background
and Context
● 1,500 pupils
● Age 12 – 18
● Dedicated server
● Early adopter

5. Getting to Know You
● How many host your own Moodle
site?
● What OS are you running?
● What web server are you running?
● What database are you running?

6. Format
● Platform / Architecture Overview
● Best practices / info sharing
● Hands-on

7. Hosting Application Layer
● Web Server
● Database Server
● Moodledata (dataroot)
● Sessions

8. Server Options
● Dedicated / Virtual / Shared
● OS selection
● Database selection

9. Platform Selection
● Linux most used for scalability
● Windows significantly lower performance
for PHP apps
● Mac OSX forking performance issue
– Apache and MySQL concurrency issue

10. Know What's Happening on Your Server
● Monitoring: Cacti
– SNMP monitoring
– Round robin log storage
● Alerts and Notifications: Nagios
– SNMP alert system Pingdom
– Have your servers page or text you!

11. Performance Testing
● jMeter
● Apache ab utility

12. Hands-on
● Download jMeter
● Show ab

13. Performance Tips
● PHP Accelerator – APC
● MySQL –
– Buffers and Query Caching
– Use InnoDB
– Use Percona build
● Sessions
● Moodle source code location

14. More Tips
● Batch cron.php runs for multiple
Moodles
● Check state of indexes and bigints
● Perform database maintenance

15. Performance Tweaking
● Memory Budget
● Concurrency
● 5 Things Making Your Site Slow
● Testing

16. Hands-on
Working with jMeter for performance
testing

17. Questions?