Separate sites for Moodle and Joomla

Hi,
We are wanting to separate the Moodle 2.3.2 component of our Joomla 2.5.9 website to its own site so we can speed up access. The integration appears to be quite slow and we don't know an alternative. We have Joomdle 0.82 and are using Virtuemart 2.0.18. Can you direct me to where I can find information on how to do the configuration and/or whether there are going to be issues? thanks

Hi there,

The installation and configuration can be found in the wiki / documentation above on the top menu.

Separating Joomdle and Moodle into two domains is possible. In my personal experience not as straight forward depending on your hosting companies restrictions when providing server to server access.

With regards to separation for performance reasons this really comes down to your customer behavior. Some times it is better to take the same money, required for a new server, and upgrade the existing one instead. You will need to look at how many users you need to support at any given time and also look at what they will be doing mainly. For example will they be playing a lot of video, reading, doing quizzes, etc. If there is a lot of video you may want to consider moving the videos off line to a cloud environment so that you can leverage their CDN environment keeping the text and graphics content local. Just having Joomla and Moodle on the same server only means you take up a tiny bit more disk space - no big deal, so it comes down to their activity / behavior. Typically you will find the bottlenecks are either server memory or bandwidth.

Thanks Chris,
That is very helpful. I've had advice from 2 developers to separate them out as we will be engaging customers in a lot of video but nothing near gaming type video. I'm reluctant to do that as from a site management perspective, it is easier for me and the business. We currently have very few on the site and it is still way way too slow. I've upgraded the bandwidth and memory available to the site through our host company and still it is way too slow. Is there something else in the configuration perhaps that may be affecting the speed?

That is a big question without understanding any of the server configuration.
Possible areas to look at include:
- physical server configuration
- bandwidth being provided
- server scripts
- content being stored
- cache configurations

Since you have lots of videos, are they access through Moodle or through Joomla. If direct from moodle than Joomla should not be causing you too much overhead. The time you will get benefit from separation is where there is lots going on in both environments concurrently.

Note: We have seen a few installations where performance decreased after connecting Joomla to Moodle. This was typically because of a wider site environmental issue but highlighted when Joomdle got involved. I think in each case, Jomsocial was also involved too.

So to ensure, you may wish to isolate Joomdle from the performance issue. Ie How is the performance when Joomdle is switched off (turn off you joomdle plug-ins and do the same task repeated - turn on your joomdle plugins and do the same task repeatedly).

Thank you Chris,

I've found your answers very helpful in my deliberations about the site as you've helped me to think through the issues.
After 4 attempts, we've found a Moodle developer who knows what he is doing and he has the interface speeded up somewhat. Enough to hold us over whilst we think through the long term prospects for the site and what we set it up to manage into the future.

We'll be looking for a solution that does not affect the seamless interface between Moodle and Joomla so will want to keep the full functionality of Joomdle. My major concern was if the Joomla and Moodle instances were placed on separate url addresses as in - not on the same server and whether this would affect the Joomdle interface. As you'll tell I'm not that technical but I am the decision maker so I needed to understand the decision I need to make and I could not get the information I needed from the developers I was using.

Your responses helped me to clarify what I was making a decision about. I could still use clarity on the separate server / url question.

Thanks
Delia

Understand your issue. For my education site, I have similar issues to consider. For me, the priority always starts from the customer's perspective first - considering they are the ones using and presumably paying for the system.

Domain / URL
Thus a single interface to me is important so that I promote 1 brand (url) and not two. I do not want multiple brands confusing the customers nor do I want those clever ones typing in the wrong urls, etc. just to see how they can get around the system. While Moodle is still presented in a wrapper (even when on a different domain), I would not want introduce the opportunity / increase the risk of somebody finding out there was two brands (urls) unless they are so close that it makes sense. Eg. mydomain.com and mydomainsvideos.com or videos.mydomain.com (where this is on a different server).

This does not only apply to multiple urls but also the same url and redirection. Eg. I always redirect mydomain.com to www.mydomain.com , thus the browser's url address bar always shows the www in front even if the customer does not type in the www. (Note: lack of redirection can also cause problems on a Joomdle installation.)

Video Serving
As said there are always ways to speed up your site. Based on the fact that you have large / many videos, without looking at your environment, my gut feel tells me that assuming you have a number of concurrent users and/or you have small pipes from your hosting provider, streaming them from a big provider such as amazon will allow you to take advantage of their big pipes. Thus your server's pipes do not need to be so wide as they only accommodate smaller page downloads. A simple comparison would be to place a video on your server and the same video on youtube. Compare the speed with one user watching. Compare with multiple say 2, 5, 10, 20 users watching at the same time. Note the following: Time to start watching ie time from click on play to the time it starts to show in your browser. Note the number of times the video is buffering (waiting for the video to come down). Nothing more frustrating than clicking play than waiting for 5 minutes for the video to start or starting a video and having to wait during the climax of the story. (Of course these tests are not perfect because of your own ISP pipes and server if you are using a proxy, the activity on your server and the pipes your server is on, and similar for the amount of activity on youtube). You could even try a different hosting company with the same server / pipe configuration or higher to see the difference. Many of these companies offer 30 money back with no questions so testing / comparing is quite simple if you have the time.

Also when deal with video you need to consider how you stream (ie what software you use) - there are plenty of differences with the different software video streaming servers. Or perhaps you are just linking to the video stored on the server (another big no no because you may loose buffering capabilities which directly affects performance)? What quality of video eg. HD or a low res version? What format is the video (avi, mpeg4, flv, etc. as this affects size of the video) Does the video support any interaction or just stop start rewind?

Server Separation
Finally, just a point to note as I have seen this before, when separating the moodle or videos or anything and moving part of your content to a new server, you need to first understand very clearly where the bottleneck is. As you said you upgraded the memory and it didn't seem to make a difference. Then, that suggests to me that it was never the bottleneck in the first place.

Also when separating, make sure you really separate physically. Eg. If the videos are slow and you move moodle to another server, perhaps the problem was the pipes and yet you moved to your trusted hosting provider who uses the same pipes for this new server. Ie two different servers on the same physical network (piece of wire) behind the same firewall (policeman) thus all you do is increase your number of servers but still have the same bottleneck. In fact, you may have made the situation worse because there is more stuff around. Similarly, moving moodle to another server could result in moving it to another domain on the same physical server in the case of shared hosting environments.

I realise that I have not solved your problem, and perhaps even made it more confusing because of the permutations, but hopefully can open up the issues and impress upon you the importance of understanding the real problem before deciding upon the solution.

On a final note. When I was in IT (working for a very very large MNC), selling to customers / designing solutions,etc my boss told me to always make a decision based on POET (or help the customer make their decision based on POET) - Political, Operational, Technical, Economic. Today, now that I have my own education company I tell my team the same. In your case, the political landscape in your customers and thus deal with those issues first because even if you have a wonder technical solution yet you cannot please your customers than what's the point. In fact, or at least in my case, it is cheaper for me to buy new hardware, pipes, etc than it is to acquire new customers.

Regards

Hi Chris,

Again, thank you so much for your considerations. I really appreciate that you took the time to work through the factors to consider it was very helpful for me. We continue to work through a number of issues both within the interconnectivity of Moodle and Joomla and because I'm learning and sometimes do stuff that goes wrong!

I've located the bandwidth/piping issue by upgrading the actual package not only from the Hostgator site, but from the Hosting/Reseller site or the next step in the process. Thanks for the hint about troubleshooting the whole end to end process.

We are looking at a solution that separates marketing/information type videos from learning videos with a determining factor being about the protection of IP. Unless you know of a way to stop IP theft on You tube.

You are so right about considering the customer first we've gone with adding an extension to our url ie. odr.com.au/learning to minimise confusion. What was really important for me about what you shared is that it can be done. Both databases are on the one root and It appears that the Akeeba backup we're using backs up Moodle along with Joomla in one press of a button. I'm still looking to confirm whether this is in fact the case or if Moodle 2.4 still requires the 3 different files to be backed up.

We are still working through the Moodle and Joomla interconnectivity and Joomdle Web Services, having sorted out the XMLRPC issues. Would you point me to where I could find directions for resolving issues with these areas as they show up in the System Check. I'm so keen to learn myself as getting a reliable and responsive developer has been a great challenge for us.

Thanks again for helping.

All the best

Delia

Glad to hear things are moving forward.

We are looking at a solution that separates marketing/information type videos from learning videos with a determining factor being about the protection of IP. Unless you know of a way to stop IP theft on You tube.

Yes this is a challenge. Clearly anything uploaded to Youtube or the like is great as a marketing channel but clearly is a threat for the learning side. Furthermore there is no way you can stop the videos in youtube and the like from being downloaded and shared. Thus it is important to ensure that all parts of the video are watermarked (better still if the video is produced with your brand in mind rather than a pure watermark) that provides links back to your site. It is even worth, IMO, to brand the youtube channel such that it is obvious there is a source. You can also consider placing a smaller marketing video (intro) with a more detailed marketing video on your server to see what type of click through you get. Tests the performance of the call to action. The downside is 1) if it is successful, you could get hundreds, thousands, millions of clicks to your site killing it 2) people don't like to click through unless there is true benefit. Personally, I would keep full marketing on youtube and just measure call to action for buying, more details, etc. and use the views as a counter too.

The IP of your learning videos is of course different where you wish to stop downloading or unauthorised views of the videos. This really comes down to what video streaming software you are using. There is a number of solutions, many of which are designed with this in mind. Some are video serving software such as corp.kaltura.com/ which integrate with both Moodle and Joomla. Similarly there are video sharing solutions in Joomla and/or Moodle (ie extensions) but not as powerful as Kaltura. There are other approaches where you combine the video into an overall protected content package for eg. Qarbon and iSpring. This really comes down to your course design and how the videos are intended to be used. Given you know what your content is, I would play around (perhaps just their demo sites) with the various technology to see what they are capable of. And then start to think about how you can customise your videos (perhaps in snippets or combined with tests) leveraging the technology. Ie don't go build all the videos first until you understand more about the techie stuff - they must all move forward together.

Both databases are on the one root and It appears that the Akeeba backup we're using backs up Moodle along with Joomla in one press of a button. I'm still looking to confirm whether this is in fact the case or if Moodle 2.4 still requires the 3 different files to be backed up.

Yes and No. Akeeba can be used to backup all of the database at once. Great saves effort. That said, it also makes the backup file size much larger. I do this. I use Akeeba to auto backup all my data (Joomla and otherwise) once a month (you define your time). I also schedule separate Akeeba sessions to backup Joomla tables and other tables independently. If it is scheduled to happen automatically, I don't really care how many backup files are being run as long as there is a known consistent approach to my schedule. I like to separate because I may not wish to restore all at once. IMO the decision of how much to backup at once should be based on how much I wish to restore at once. Ie data out determines my data in. Similar with your videos. You produce them (in) based on how you wish your customers to use them (out). You will also find that you may wish (may need to depending on how you store your moodle data folder) to use a unix backup as well. Typically we store the moodledata folder outside of the public_html folder and akeebackup is not backing outside of public_html (maybe possible I really cannot remember this). Again, I also choose to backup my files (not data) separately (and combined) so that I can restore just the files if I need to. Basically cost of disk is cheap and the files are not big anyway so why not allow yourself the confidence to know that you can restore easily and quickly in different situations.)

Also, the more stuff I put into one backup file increases my risk of not having a good backup to restore later. For example, one if my one backup file is corrupted? Then I loose all?

On a final point for my decision to separate my backups, I have my testing and staging server with the same files but different data. I would not wish to use my production backup, restore it to test and begin testing new stuff only to find I am accidentally sending emails to my customers because the backup contained real users. Thus I can restore my production files and then use test data quite easily. Same for staging.

So in summary, for me:
- I backup data and files separately because data changes everyday and files do not. (Using akeepbackup)
- I exclude images and media files (video too would be important in your case) to keep my backup files small. These files I backup with scheduled system (unix) backups.
- I keep different data and file backups so I can restore for different purposes.
- I keep system level (unix / cpanel) backups of both my files and data as a secondary source of restore.
- I keep a full system level backup (done my hosting company) for a full site wide restore

We are still working through the Moodle and Joomla interconnectivity and Joomdle Web Services, having sorted out the XMLRPC issues. Would you point me to where I could find directions for resolving issues with these areas as they show up in the System Check. I'm so keen to learn myself as getting a reliable and responsive developer has been a great challenge for us.

This one is the easy one www.joomdle.com/wiki/System_health_check While it is not 100% up to date as we find new types of errors or as the code improves, it does give the reasons for 90% of the system check errors. And certainly points you in the correct direction.

c

Hi Chris and Delia,

Also on my configuration (J2.5.6+M2.3.1+jmdl0.82) I do experience slow server response. Disabling the Moodle plugins doesn't show the difference, it is the cURL connection which works slow. When deleting the Moodle URL in the Joomdle configuration, it shows a much more significant difference.

And I don't understand why it also effects the normal native Joomla pages.

My solution for that is the use of mod_expires etc. on my Apache VPS. With a good setting, Joomla pages load really quickly again!! (2sec. instead of 13sec./page) But the problem starts again when a user is logged in. Because then Joomla doesn't use cache memory anymore.

So I was wondering if there is a possibility to postphone the cURL connection untill the user really wants to go into a course. Or other ways to speed up this connection?

Thanks. Have you tried using file_get_contents rather than curl?