Moodle

[neilwhamilton]

Hi Folks

Im running a moodle site on a Linux vps with Eukhost. It has 512 MB memory. Im finding the site occasionally crashes due to memory usage. It is only used by a couple of dozen students. Could anyone give me any suggestions on what i could do to improve the performance other than upgrading?

Thanks
Neil

[eukSam]

Hello Neil,


We have checked your vps, the vps is already running with extra memory. The current memory assigned is almost 1.3GB, but still we can see failcounts for privvmpages & dcachesize.

resource held maxheld barrier limit failcnt
privvmpages 184761 184803 1361920 1433600 14657
dcachesize 10120142 10125137 10149094 10571973 1442805


There is not much we can do on this vps, but if you want we can provide you with a new vps on one of our new hardware node.

[srichards]

Have you tried moodle's own site for support? They might have some pointers as to why it is gobbling up so much memory.

We used to run moodle with quite a number of students but I don't remember memory being an issue with it particularly. Would be often 40-100 students using it at once and there were usually several hundred users over the course of a week. This was quite a number of versions ago though so it may have got more resource hungry over time.

[srichards]

Have you tried moodle's own site for support? They might have some pointers as to why it is gobbling up so much memory.

We used to run moodle with quite a number of students but I don't remember memory being an issue with it particularly. Would be often 40-100 students using it at once and there were usually several hundred users over the course of a week. This was quite a number of versions ago though so it may have got more resource hungry over time.

[neilwhamilton]

Originally Posted by srichards

Have you tried moodle's own site for support? They might have some pointers as to why it is gobbling up so much memory.

We used to run moodle with quite a number of students but I don't remember memory being an issue with it particularly. Would be often 40-100 students using it at once and there were usually several hundred users over the course of a week. This was quite a number of versions ago though so it may have got more resource hungry over time.

Thats interesting, was it on a VPS server? Find it strange that its a script that is made available to install when it cant really run due to memory issues. Seems to like selling a stair lift with a bungalow.

[neilwhamilton]

Originally Posted by eukSam

Hello Neil,


We have checked your vps, the vps is already running with extra memory. The current memory assigned is almost 1.3GB, but still we can see failcounts for privvmpages & dcachesize.

resource held maxheld barrier limit failcnt
privvmpages 184761 184803 1361920 1433600 14657
dcachesize 10120142 10125137 10149094 10571973 1442805


There is not much we can do on this vps, but if you want we can provide you with a new vps on one of our new hardware node.

Hi there, i was wondering what the advantages of a new vps would be? Is it a different package?

[srichards]

It wasn't on a vps. A pair of basic dell servers were used. Think they only had a max 512mb memory each. Might even have been 256 mb. One did the web serving and other did the database bit.

My guess is that your problem could be a mysql kind of issue with it using lots of connections and maybe not shutting them off properly. Also check out php's max mem setting as I think that also has a different limit and you can find it says 'out of memory' when it really means that that memory allowance is configured too low. Moodle generally moans about this though but I suppose it is possible if you are using a certain combination of features or content then it might start to balk at it. Have you much interactive or video content on there? Again these are memory hungry.