Boosting Moodle Performance – Tips To Speed Up Your Moodle Website

Moodle, aka Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment, an open-source platform which lets you create interactive, collaborative content and online courses through Learning Management System (LMS) or Virtual Learning Environment (VLE).

Deploying any Moodle website can be very profitable. Moodle website owners can make the most out of their Modular architecture and can implement plenty of functional modules/extensions on the site to make the educational interface more attractive, interesting and engaging.

However, you might feel sometimes the decrease of your Moodle’s website load time and performance. With too many extensions installed on your Moodle site or being shrink on your Moodle hosting plan, can also give your Moodle website users a hard time. Since nothing can spoil the name and reputation of a website than its low speed and functionality.

I am going to share down here few tricks to optimize and speed up your Moodle website.

1: The Basic Tweaks

Before taking any further step towards optimization techniques, it is necessary for you to understand and consider first some of the basic things which can cause or make your Moodle website slow.

2: Get a Managed Moodle Cloud Hosting

Discover first whether the hosting plan you are on suits your website or not. If you are using shared hosting then obviously it’s the root cause for your Moodle website to function slowly and makes it more delicate for security threats as well. Get Managed Moodle Cloud Hosting for better and adequate resources and security.

3: Baseline Monitoring

If using in-house servers then do monitor the components of the system which are the baseline of your Moodle site. For Linux Operating System, try LBS and for Windows Monitoring System, use performance monitor. Once you are done gathering the information about your system performance, you can now improve the performance and speed of your Moodle website by making changing in system components such as RAM, caching or Disk Space.

4: Operating System

Moodle runs on limited operating systems such as Windows, Linux, Mac OS and UNIX. But for the better performance, Linux is supposed to be the core Operating System on the servers which can run your Moodle website. Do check your hosting provider too and see if their systems are giving the recommended configuration to Moodle or not. If not, then change your hosting ASAP.

5: Additional Performance Tweaks for Desktops

If you are using FireFox, integrate firebug and then YSlow extension in it. This advance tool will tell you the exact loading time of each page of your Moodle website. Also, the YSlow tool will evaluate all the pages in contrast to Yahoo’s 14 rule for fast loading website and gives you the metrics of some common issues on your website.

6: PHP Accelerators to less the CPU load

It is suggested for both in-house servers hosting providers to make use of PHP accelerators according to the PHP version. The PHP Accelerator will help to ease the load from the servers while processing PHP queries.

7: Check Memory Limit

The latest version of Moodle requires larger memory. Check the memory_limit in php.ini. If the Moodle version is earlier than ver1.7 then reduce the memory to 16M and for 1.7 versions, increase the memory limit to 40M.

8: Optimize the Performance of Apache Server

If your Windows server has Apache installed then use the Apache Lounge build version because this build of Apache is far better in performance and stability than the official one. Do remember one thing this version won’t keep you updated with the official patches and releases of Apache.

9: Increase MaxClients Memory Limit

Increasing the memory of MaxClients will leave 80% of the available memory for spare. Apache requires maximum 10 MB memory for processes increase up to 100MB. This whole thing will render your Moodle website pages fast.

Tip: Don’t increase the MaxClients value to above 256 as this would allow your server to eat more memory.

10: Tweak MYSQL Performance

Change MYSQL settings for better performance of the Moodle website. But make sure you have made the backup of the databases before taking any attempt to change the configuration of MYSQL.

Some Other Tools to Increase Moodle’s Performance

There are some other methods available to increase or boost up the load time for the Moodle website. Such as CDNs (Content Delivery Network) can make your Moodle website accessible for all and Memcached allows quick rendering of the web pages.

Well, these are some tips to speed up the performance of your Moodle Website. Hope they work for you. Got any other tip? Do let us know in the comment section below.