Moodle.org configuration

This page describes the hardware and software configurations for the moodle.org family of sites.

moodle.org

This site runs the main Moodle site. As of 8th March 2009 moodle.org is running on two machines directly linked by a 1Gb VLAN. You can see some test results of this configuration, which we feel can comfortably support at least 500 normally active concurrent users.

moodle.org web server

• 2 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5405 - 8 cores @ 2Ghz each
• 2 x 146GB 15k RPM SAS drives in RAID 1 via PERC 6/i controller
• 8Gb Registered ECC RAM

This machine runs Apache and PHP with an eaccelerator cache of 256M. Moodle is also configured to use eaccelerator shared memory as well as 15-second record caching. MySQL is accessed using the mysqli module.

moodle.org database server

• 1 x Quad Core Intel Xeon E5405 - 4 cores @ 2Ghz each
• 3 x 146GB 15K RPM SAS drives in RAID 5 via PERC 6/i controller
• 8Gb Registered ECC RAM

This machine runs MySQL 5.1.38 with InnoDB tables only. The disks have battery-backed RAID so we enabled direct writes for additional speed.

Some key innodb settings (subject to change of course):

innodb_buffer_pool_size = 4G
innodb_file_io_threads = 4
innodb_thread_concurrency = 16
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2
innodb_log_buffer_size = 4M
innodb_log_file_size = 256M
innodb_flush_method=O_DIRECT

docs.moodle.org

This site runs twenty or so MediaWiki sites that make up Moodle Docs in all different languages.

• 2 x Dual core Intel Xeon - 4 cores at 2.4 Ghz each
• 2 x 80Gb SATA drives in RAID 1
• 2Gb RAM

tracker.moodle.org

This site runs the tracker software Jira, which is a Java application.

• Intel Xeon Quare Core - 4 cores at 2.8 Ghz each
• 2 x 250Gb SATA drives in RAID 1
• 6Gb RAM

See also

• Performance - describes things to think about for maximum performance