Moodle’s performance at scale: From 400 to 10,000 users in 10 days

July 26, 2021 By Júlia Verdaguer

Moodle LMS, the world’s most customisable and trusted open source learning management system, can support installations of all sizes.

 

Designed to grow with your organisation

With the right hardware and IT people, or with the help of one of our Moodle Certified Service Providers, your Moodle site can go from handling a few hundreds to hundreds of thousands of users simultaneously logging in and actively navigating in the platform, requesting, downloading, or updating information.

This is because Moodle LMS is designed with a clear separation of application layers or tiers, which enables it to perform in environments with load balancers that distribute requests and traffic to your site across multiple web servers. Because it has the ability to access extra resources automatically, Moodle LMS’s performance is not compromised by sudden increases in the volume of traffic. It also lets you set limits on memory requests by a given page in order to prevent memory hoarding by one user or process, ensuring uptime and consistent performance. 

All of that makes Moodle LMS capable of handling installations featuring hundreds of thousands of users accessing resources, learning and interacting simultaneously. In fact, the largest registered Moodle sites in the world currently have over one million users!

 

Scalability case study: From 400 to 10,000K users in 10 days

Offering 91 bachelor’s programs, over 100 masters and 41 PhD programs, the University of Jordan is one of the top 250 universities in the world in student employability.

To support their online exams, the University had a virtual learning environment built on Moodle LMS, which supported up to 400 users taking exams simultaneously. With the University’s growth, their VLE stopped meeting their needs and its slow performance was starting to cause distress amongst students. With all teaching and learning moving online due to Covid-19, the University needed to implement a trustable solution, fast.

In order to keep providing a top-quality online learning experience for their students, UJ contacted Certified Moodle Service Providers Eummena. In just 10 days, this team of edtech experts built a new hosting environment on their Eummena Cloud service and migrated the University’s Moodle LMS. This new cloud hosting ensures excellent performance for the University’s Moodle site, as it is based on a three-tier architecture:

  • The Presentation tier is where all users of the learning platform connect directly.
  • The Application tier holds the main code that processes users’ requests, implementing the application logic of the learning platform.
  • The Data tier is responsible for the storage and management of all data, including permanent and temporary data (for session management and caching). 

After the successful and fast migration of their Moodle LMS, now the University of Jordan can have 10,000 concurrent users on their learning platform. You can read more about this case study on Eummena’s site

 

Already running your own Moodle LMS site? Learn more about Moodle scalability and performance in our documentation for systems administrators and developers.

 

Or get in touch with one of our Certified Moodle Service Providers in your area to help you scale your Moodle site and make sure it performs to the highest standards.