Hi
We're running Totara 2.2 serving around 1500 users and the other week the deadline arrived for nearly 1100 of them to have done some mandatory training, which inevitably most had not done so they started hitting the server hard that day! The loads went through the roof, and the swap was getting a heck of a workout.
We were told ages ago that the Rackspace configuration (dual core, 2GB memory) would be enough to cope with ~100 logged in users, with about 30 concurrent accesses to the server at any given time and although I don't have any hard figures to hand it seems it struggled to cope with even 30 logged in users and much lower concurrency.
Since then I've further fine-tuned the configuration going off various pages (Totara tech specs, Moodle docs etc) but I'm wondering if there is anything else that can be done? The current setup is:
- Ubuntu 12.04
- Apache 2 (prefork) using mod_php
- PHP 5.3.10 with APC installed (96MB cache size)
- Postgresql 9.1 (on the same server)
- Moodle 2.2.23
Apache is configured:
- maxclients 10
- maxrequestsperclient 30
- keepalivetimeout 2
Given the server spec (which realistically we can't do much about at this time) is it worth perhaps looking at Apache(worker) with php-fpm, or even ditching Apache and going to nginx/php-fpm? When I get the time I will try benchmarking the different installations in a VM but I just wondered what others experiences with similar spec hardware/sized setups are?
Thanks, Darren