Server specs

Hi.

I'm trying to get a feeling for what kind of specification I need for a Joomdle server.

I've done a lot of googling to try to get an answer, but I'm not sure that much of it has been very useful -- I've found lots of info about specs for Joomla or Moodle on their own, but a lot of it is badly out of date and none of it covers running both platforms together.

So let's say for arguments sake that I have a typical Joomdle system that needs to support a 20-30 concurrent users, what kind of server specs would you suggest?

Rough guides or rules of thumb will be fine here; I'm not looking for detailed analysis of my particular needs. In fact, I'm hoping that answers to this question will be general enough to prove useful to more than just myself -- there's a distinct lack of up-to-date information out there on how to work out this kind of thing.

Many thanks for any help.

I suspect you will find little information because there are many factors that affect your question. In general having Joomla and Moodle on the same system does not have any impact on anything except for storage space, assuming your concurrent users is constant. That said Joomdle does have some overhead because it is logging a user into two platforms and manages the sessions between both. I would not, however, say it takes any specific percentage more resources as we are talking about milliseconds of processing time. Furthermore, the cost of CPU and RAM is so cheap that it is normally not a question asked these days. I think the following statements will help you more:
- For testing anything is fine noting that many shared hosting environments do not support CURL or XML-RPC which is required for connectivity
- For production, IMO, a scalable VPS is preferred so that you can grow your platform as the demand grows
- Chose a hosting plan that uses SSD
- Choosing a good hosting company that does not overload the number of servers is important as many of the shared hosts just load them up (an other reason for VPS)
- Pipes / bandwidth is just as important if not more than many of the server specs
- Personally, in a production environment I would not have any less than 512MB memory. That said, even for my testing environments I never go less than 1024 - again cost vs benefit. In these days I am starting to use 2048 as my min memory since the price difference is so small. But as said if you choose a scalable VPS you can start with 1024 and upgrade if necessary.

The above are all server specs, however, again IMO I feel your content will have just as big an impact and so will your caching approach.
- Choose a thin template (joomla side) and almost nothing moodle side to minimise page load times
- Optimize your images
- Compress css, js, etc.
- Use a CDN to leverage the much larger cloud based caching environments for your css, js, images, static pages. This will allow you to keep a small spec server as use others' hardware environment. We use the No Number CDN for Joomdle www.nonumber.nl/extensions/cdnforjoomla and about 30% - 50% of our non pages are no loaded from the cloud rather than from our server.
- There are other caching techniques you can apply to your own server such as memcache which I rarely use but clearly work.

Finally, the other area that people tend to over look is their own implementation of extensions.
- Many servers I have seen load up so many system plugins, each one slowing down every page. If you do not need, do not enable.
- Don't load too many modules on one page
- Again watch the images on heavy pages (cache them or cache them in the cloud)

I think that is about all we can say at this point without knowing your extensions, implementation, etc. etc.