Moodle: How big is big?

We’ve been using Moodle at my school for years and it’s a real workhorse for us. Moodle is used in classrooms K-12, for committees, clubs, activities and for numerous other school needs.

As we are prepare for an upgrade to Moodle 2.0 I need to take stock in what we’re doing, how we are doing it and actually how big of an install we have.

One of the main reasons for this is we are trying to determine if we should continue to host Moodle internally on our school network or outsource the hosting to Remote-Learner.net (@remotelearner), who we’ve been using for years for support.

As we look at our options we have to consider a number of things: file storage size, database size, number of users, number of concurrent users and bandwidth.

In order to make the best decision I would need to dig into our install and see where we stand.

This wasn’t an easy task as our server is running on LINUX ,which I am unfamiliar with, MySQL, which I know even less about and would require some fancy footwork with Terminal and some Unix/Linux commands.

In the end I was able to come up with the following:

1. We have a MySQL database that is 2.95 GB and a data folder with 118.3 GB of files.
2. We move an average of 1.1 GB of data on a daily basis in and out of the server and 10.7 GB per week.
3. We have over 1801 users in the system (some duplicates)
4. We have 1285 active courses running.

For a little context on the size of our school.

1. PK-12 with about 1,000 students
2. Roughly 200 faculty
3. Additional users include Board Members and various other constituent groups within the school

With all of this my question is how big are we? How does this compare to other schools? What can you tell me?

RESOURCES:

• MySQL Commands: http://www.pantz.org/software/mysql/mysqlcommands.html
• Sequel Pro (GUI app – Mac): http://www.sequelpro.com/
• Database Size Command: http://forums.mysql.com/read.php?108,201578,201578