Exploiting Moodle Performance under Various Configuration

Abstract

Education is not the learning of facts. It’s rather training of the mind to think as said by Einstein. Online learning plays a vital role in any educational sector. From the past few decades this is really expand in terms of the development of latest technology both hardware and or software to make e-learning (virtual and also remote) possible across the globe. There are several resources available now a days in market both proprietary and or open source, Moodle is one of them which are indexed under the open source (this is one of the biggest advantage). For distance education Web-based labs are innovative tools that help to describe scientific phenomena. Those phenomena require costly equipment which is also very hard when it comes to the arrangement of those equipments. Easy Java Simulations (EJS) is the promising tool for such problem. Open Source Physics (OSP) repository shows how important EJS is. OSP hosts hundreds of free EJS labs. In this case Moodle LMS (learning management system) provide social contexts where students interact with each other. The work described in this paper looks for the best performance gives by Moodle configuration which is decided by changing the paging size of a server machine. To check this we use Jmeter as a server Load testing Tool. Finally decided paging is use for server configuration for showing a setup of EJS virtual lab which helps maximum number of user to understand the Gyroscope (as an experiment).

Keywords: Moodle, learning management system, remote laboratory, virtual laboratory, web-based experimentation.