Moodle server

Disclaimer: I am not a professional server administrator but I have looked after Moodle servers for several years now, and never experienced major issues. What I am sharing has worked for me, but might not work for you. You’ve been warned! Why it matters The more RAM Moodle has access to, the faster it will run and the more users it will be able to serve (if configured properly). It is therefore important for the Web server to use as little RAM as possible, so that more users can be served at the same time....

I have ordered my tips in decreasing order of importance i.e. the ones that really matter are at the top. When reading the graphs, make sure you take a look at the scale, as differences can be minimal. It is important to remember that sound pedagogy and good course design are more important than a super fast server. For the impatient (spoiler) Things that impact performance Amount of blocks displayed on your course pages ‘Show one section only’ in your course settings Images in labels Amount of sections, resources & activities Activity tracking & conditional activities Forum tracking ‘Theme designer’ mode ‘Cache language strings’ option Things that don’t really impact performance Theme Course format Groups/Groupings Note: I ran a series of tests to find out what made a difference when displaying course pages on Moodle, as a student....

Note: this post is aimed towards admins who run their Moodle installation on a Ubuntu Linux server. As usual, this is not meant to be a definitive list or how-to, but rather an introduction to what a Moodle administrator can do to ensure their installation is running smoothly. Monitoring tools The following tools are listed in increasing order of difficulty of use. I have used them all but I have found that unless I load test, the first 3 tools tend to be enough for me....

This post is part of the Moodle Oktobertest series. iMacros records your web browsing activity so that you can later simulate the actions of a real Moodle user, all automatically. For example, you start up Firefox and set iMacros to record. You go about your daily business on Moodle as normal (e.g. login, view your course, add an assignment, answer some forum posts and logout), iMacros keeps a record of everything you click on during your session, including all the forms that you fill in until you press ‘Stop recording’....