Moodle LMS Performance Issues with 5000+ Users

Hi everyone,

We’re experiencing severe performance issues with our Moodle installation serving 5000+ concurrent users. Page load times have increased to 15-20 seconds during peak hours.

Current Setup

• Moodle Version: 4.1.7
• Server: Dell PowerEdge R740
• RAM: 32GB
• CPU: Intel Xeon Gold 6230 (20 cores)
• Database: MySQL 8.0
• Web Server: Apache 2.4
• PHP: 8.0

Issues Observed

1. Slow page loads during 8AM-12PM
2. Database connection timeouts
3. High CPU usage (95%+)
4. Session handling errors
5. Quiz submission failures

What We’ve Tried

• Enabled Moodle caching (Redis)
• Increased PHP memory limit to 512M
• Optimized MySQL queries
• Added database indexes

Still experiencing issues. Has anyone dealt with similar problems? Any suggestions for:

• Database optimization techniques?
• Load balancing setup?
• Alternative caching strategies?
• Hardware upgrade recommendations?

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

UPDATE: Issue resolved! Solution was to implement database clustering with read replicas. Thanks to everyone who helped!