One of the questions we need to ask ourselves is how easily open source course management systems like Moodle will scale. So let's see what the Using Moodle forums have to offer here. Once in the Using Moodle forums I keyed 'scaleability' into the Moodle site search engine and got one article returned! But all was not lost, keying 'scalability' seemed to do the trick. One article posed the question:
“Who are the largest users? I'd love to know how may classes, sections, students and enrollments they're able to run.”
I selected the above posting as the parent and chose a threaded view of the discussion which ensued. This provided me with a chain of messages from January to August 2004. Here are some extracts:
“The biggest active site I know has 1400 courses and about 17000 students.” Martin Dougiamas
“There are no limitations inherent in Moodle … it all comes down to hardware grunt and that depends on many factors such as the features being used and how they are being used. More RAM and more CPU can solve any problem” Martin Dougiamas
“When looking at the CPU and RAM, is there a way to split Moodle up onto multiple servers. For example, a Server for just the Database, and a series of Servers for student Interface.” Charles Libby
“It is definitely possible to build a Linux cluster from multiple computers and run Moodle on it.” Martin Dougiamas
“… we potentially have a vast user base; especially when you add in the wider use in the Adult and community Learning sector (potentially 70,000 plus users).” Ted Edmondson … “You might be foolhardy installing one single Moodle for all those users, though things might be improved by 2006.” Martin Dougiamas
