Moodle Load TestingPresented by Paul Stevens // 17 April 2014

Who am I?

●Originally a Sysadmin●10 years of Biometrics and Telco Developments●3.5 Years with Catalyst●First project was delivering Totara LMS●Delivered several Moodle Infrastructures from 200 – 2 Million Users●Now MD of Catalyst's Europe Office

How size do we need our Moodle Infrastructure, how much will it cost?

●What Set-up do we need?

●Need best estimate of:–Number of users–Number of courses–Number of plug-ins/Customisations–Redundancy Requirements–Access Requirements–Number of concurrent users

But what is a Moodle concurrent user?

●Most common contracted measurement - however it has the least clear definition●What “Concurrent Users” has meant on real projects:–Number of Logged in users at the time–Number of Logged in users over a time period–Users completing a SCORM or specific task–Number of concurrent views according to Google Analytics–Users viewing a page at that second (Page Views)

To size your system 'Concurrent User' requirement must be Defined!

●Decide how you are going to measure it–My Favourite is Page Views●Do your best to predict–User usage patterns–Type of usage on the system–Guess at load increase–over time●Devise a best guess peek●Add a margin of error

Most common ways to implement a Moodle

●Bare Metal Internal infrastructure●Internal Shared Virtualised infrastructure – VMware or KVM●Outsourced Infrastructure – Bare Metal or Cloud●Outsourced Turnkey Solution with a Moodle Partner

most set-ups the Moodle DatabaseSet-up is the Performance Achilles Heal

LoadTesting

Setting up the load test

●Build your Chosen Environment, preferably with every element●Tune everything as best you can●Automate your scripts, so you can repeat many times – we use Jmeter and Bees with Machine guns●Test from the networks your users use●Set-up your monitoring●Record your results and your monitoring

Find the Bottleneck..

Fix..

Repeat..

Setting up the load test

●Build your Chosen Environment, preferably with every element●Tune everything as best you can●Automate your scripts, so you can repeat many times – we use Jmeter and Bees with Machine guns●Test from the networks your users use●Set-up your monitoring●Record your results and your monitoring

Ways to tweak to make Moodle to perform better..

●More hardware●More bandwidth●Better code●A better Software stack●A better hardware configuration●Tweaking the Software stack

●And runs tests again..

How to deal with the Political Pressure.

●Are you sure it wont crash and burn?

●We need to Launch tomorrow..

●Why do you need to spend so much time testing?

●The Definition of 'Concurrent Users' is wrong it should be..

Our Preferred Set-up for Performance

●Ubuntu Linux●Niginx●PHP-FPM●APC●Postfix for the DB

What to look out for:●Lack of RAM●Bad disk IO●Network Latency●Poorly tuned DB servers●Lack of PHP accelerator

Questions?