How to list the largest files in a Moodle 2.x site

Earlier this week, I was working with a client whose Moodle server was full. They asked me to help figure out why it was full. This can be a challenging question when using Moodle 2.x due to the fact that files are saved in a single hashed space. In this client's case, 6 SCORM files were using 3/5 of all their storage. Here is the simple query I developed to create the list showing the original filename and path, the storage used in megabytes, the content hash (ie filename used in moodle data folder), and which component of Moodle owns the file. The output is sorted by largest files first with a limit of the 50 largest files.


SELECT DISTINCT filename, filepath, FORMAT( (filesize /1024 /1024), 1 ) AS filesize_MB, contenthash, component
FROM  `mdl_files` 
ORDER BY filesize DESC 
LIMIT 0 , 50


If you are a Remote-Learner hosting client you can run this query via your phpMyAdmin link contained in your customer kit, or request via our support portal.

During this research I also found that its is possible for a file to become orphaned. In this situation the file is still stored in the moodle data folder, but is no longer referenced in the mdl_files table of the database. Look for a future post on how to track down orphaned files.

Why Your Moodle Site is Slow: Five Simple Settings

Here are some simple settings that any Moodle administrator can change from the Site Administration menu that will help to improve his/her Moodle site's performance. Some of these changes come at the cost of functionality, so sometimes you have to pick between a particular feature and performance (or a faster server), but often these settings are just enabled out of curiosity with no discernible reward other than a slower site.

Automated backup setup

Disable Automated backup setup for courses by setting Active to disabled in the pull down menu. The Moodle course backup and restore feature, while a convenient mechanism for moving courses between Moodle sites, is not very efficient. As the number of courses and the size of the courses on your site increase, the scheduled course backup process takes longer and longer to complete. This can cause extreme site slowdowns while it's running. Additionally, it makes it harder for your server's backup system to complete its own nightly backups.

Site administration / ▶ Courses / ▶ Backups / ▶ Automated backup setup

Many users mistakenly view this as a way to restore their Moodle site in the event of a disaster. While it's possible to use these course backups to restore most of a site, it's not ideal or guaranteed to work when you need it. Disaster recovery backups should be performed outside of the scheduled course backup feature.

Statistics

Make sure Enable statistics is unchecked. Many administrators discover this setting and turn it on simply to see what it does. A common scenario is that a site will be performing well for a year or more and then suddenly experience problems when this setting is enabled. This setting includes options for how long to allow the statistics gathering to run in one session and how far back to process. If you must run statistics make sure to limit how long you allow the process to run. I recommend letting it run no more than 2 hours per session.

Site administration / ▶ Advanced features

Upcoming versions of Moodle may have an improved version of statistics that should reduce the load on the server's database by several orders of magnitude. So if you really need this feature, keep your eyes on MDL-30643.

Theme designer mode

Disable Theme designer mode on production Moodle sites. Theme designer mode is a great Moodle version 2 feature, if you are updating your theme and want to quickly see the impact of changes. It does this by having the Moodle server tell web browsers to not cache any of the images, css, and javascript that make up your theme. When this feature is enabled, every page view for every user must download every media object directly from the Moodle server. This makes viewing pages very very slow and greatly increases the load on the server. Administrators often enabled this to update their theme and then forget to turn it off. The best practice is to develop your theme on a testing site and then move it over to production only after it has been completed.

Site administration / ▶ Appearance / ▶ Themes / ▶ Theme settings

Cleanup

Set Keep logs for and Grade history lifetime to 365 days or less. By default Moodle will keep both your logs and grade history forever. For long established sites, these logs start to become the majority of the database. I have seen cases where log tables consumed 90% or more of the database. As a general rule the more of your database that fits into your server RAM the faster your database will perform. By limiting the size of these logs, you can make your site much faster.

Site administration / ▶ Server / ▶ Cleanup

Note: If you have a really large log, it may make your site even slower while the cleanup runs. Consider changing this setting during a low-use time or during a maintenance window. In extreme cases, it can take several hours for the cleanup query to complete the first time.

Session Handling

Disable Use database for session information by unchecking the box. Starting with Moodle version 2 and above the default setting is to have database sessions enabled. In our infrastructure, we have seen much better performance using file based sessions rather than having the database handle them. This is dependent on the server setup, but it's worth disabling to see if your performance improves.

Site administration / ▶ Server / ▶ Session handling

Pro-tips 

Below are some additional tips that take a bit more effort, but provide additional benefits related to ensuring great performance for your Moodle site.

Running multiple simultaneous manual course backups can sometimes cause problems. Avoid creating situations where many course backup / restores need to run at the same time. This is a common problem for the start of a new school term. Often instructors will be asked to duplicate their prior courses for the new term. Moodle doesn't provide any internal mechanism to queue backup requests so that they don't overwhelm your server. If enough instructors are doing this at the same time, it can make a Moodle site nearly unusable.

While all of these settings can be accessed from the Moodle interface, if you want to really make sure none of your site administrators accidentally sets one of these incorrectly, enter the desired value in your config.php file so that it cannot be enabled accidentally.

Consider starting with a clean install of Moodle once a year to have the smallest database footprint and ensure the best performance for your site.

The Little Moodle Moot that Could

I just returned from attending the Oklahoma Moodle Moot. This was my third time attending and it reinforced with me how consistently and well operated this conference is. I helped organize the first three US Moodle Moots and I have been lucky enough to travel internationally to attend both the UK and Canadian Moots. My feeling is the OK Moot is under appreciated and an incredible value at only $99 for the main two-day conference and $75 for the one-day pre-conference. Matt Campbell and his team (Sarah Carper and Tim Loughmiller from Metro Technology Centers, and Ed Hatch from Moore Norman Technology Center) did an excellent job organizing the Moot.

What they do well:

• Pre-conference
• Network access
• Facilities
• Food
• Presenter amenities
• Breadth of presentations

Every year this conference goes off like clockwork. They provide a great one day pre-conference with both in depth instructional and admin training. The network access is always rock solid, due to the venue being located at a vocational technical center geared out to take much more usage than the Moot needs. The rooms are of ample size and have the latest technology. The ball room was outfitted with four giant projection screens projecting on opposing walls; there was no bad seat in the house. The food is always well above average and this year was no exception. I was especially a fan of the yogurt and fresh fruit  snack on the afternoon of the first day. This year the conference added a presenters' lounge with snacks and beverages. I thought this was a really nice perk for the presenters that few other conferences offer. Matt even paid out of his own pocket to take the presenters to dinner (thanks Matt!). The conference offered 5 presentation strands: Business, Curriculum, Hands-on, Technical, and Moodle 2.0. The Business strand was a nice addition this year and I enjoyed getting to see some of the new features of Moodle 2.0 in action. This was further bolstered by the presence of Helen Foster, the Moodle Community Manager, who was able to take direct feedback back to the Moodle development team. If you are shopping for a conference for next summer, give this Moot a close look.

Upcoming posts will include interviews with some of the attendees including Helen Foster.

Links:
Oklohama Moot Official Site
Oklohoma Moot Moodle 2.0 Test Site
Oklahoma Moot Experts Panel video

A Year of Writing Moodle 1.9 Extension Development - Part 4

Part 4: Post Writing Production
This is the final of a four part series on my experiences writing my first book, Moodle 1.9 Extension Development. The book was co-authored by Mike Churchward. The four parts are detailed below:

• Part 1: Getting a book deal
• Part 2: Writing the first half
• Part 3: Writing the last half
• Part 4: Post writing production

I lied to myself and I knew I was doing it while I was doing it. I told myself, "if I can just finish the writing, the time commitment will go down and my life will become somewhat normal again." I had a suspicion that this wasn't the case, but it did help me get through that last push during the holidays. I think in fact that I ended up spending more time per week in editing and reviewing than during the writing. Part of this is probably due to the fact that I ended up writing some new sections from the feedback during editing. I could have said no to this, but I really wanted to have a quality book when we were done.

Technical and editorial review
We sometimes received notes just from Packt editors and sometimes we received a combined set of notes from both the editors and our technical reviewers. We got many requests to clarify small sections of text, to add new sections, and for more screen shots. An interesting note on the publishing process, while the author knows a bit of the economics of the book in terms of target page counts, etc., technical reviewers are just given a book description and the chapters. This gives a very different perspective and made it really clear that 250+ pages covers the core concepts, but that we could easily write 500 pages to make a comprehensive work on Moodle development.

Kudos to Anthony Burrow for doing such a great job with the technical review. I don't think I know a nicer, more generous person than Anthony. Anthony you are a kind soul!

Most chapters ended up with 2-3 drafts before being submitted for copy editing. Some of the early chapters had as many as 5 or 6 drafts. Packt has a very specific naming convention for drafts that helped keep track.

This process took about 2 months.

Too many pages!
Midway through the process our editor noticed that every chapter we submitted was growing in size from the original draft. We had quickly burnt through an extra 25 approved pages and needed to cut 6 pages. On top of this, I still had requests from an unedited chapter to add at least one major new section and more screen shots. It was decided the only solution was to cut the last chapter from the print version of the book and make it available for free download. This was a confusing time, but eventually we got through it and ended up with a better book as a result. Packt encouraged us to add anything we needed for the book to be really great. In fact, at the last minute before publication, our editor was able to get approval for the extra pages to include the final chapter in the printed book.

Code Review / Copy Edit
The final stage of production was copy editing and code review. We worked with a couple of great guys named Chris and Hitesh.  They were equally conversant with chasing dangling participles as they were at parsing PHP code! What a cool and unusual combination of skills. This team performed fixes to word usage, punctuation, code formatting, and installed every bit of code from the book and tested it. I actually received back some notes like "we had to edit line X of the sample to get our test environment to match your screen shot." I was simply blown away.

This part of the process went pretty quickly, typically 45 minutes to an hour per chapter. The exception was one code sample I decided needed to be re-written to fix an issue with the user interface. Major thanks to this editorial team. They really made us look good.





It's Done!
It's been a long and challenging year, but a growing year. I would recommend to anyone who, like myself, always wanted to write a book, to take the opportunity if presented. Or even better, decide today to make your own opportunity.

A Year of Writing Moodle 1.9 Extension Development - Part 3

Part 3: The Last Half of Writing
This is the third of a four part series on my experiences writing my first book, Moodle 1.9 Extension Development. The book was co-authored by Mike Churchward. The four parts are detailed below:

• Part 1: Getting a book deal
• Part 2: Writing the first half
• Part 3: Writing the last half
• Part 4: Post writing production

Chapter 8 Reports -- Writing in Belize
Our CEO, Bryan Williams, is an avid SCUBA diver. For many years, we had talked about going on a dive together with my wife Michelle. Last September, we decided to finally make this happen and to get some much needed sun. So after looking at the options, we decided on a trip to Belize. I worked out that with Mike's efforts on Chapters 5-7, that I could get back on schedule, if I could complete a full chapter while on vacation. I must say that writing on the beach is really the way to go. While it can be a bit tricky getting your computer screen at just the right angle to be visible, its well worth the effort. I didn't quite manage to get the entire chapter done on vacation, but I got most of the source code finished and completed all but one section on the plane ride back to the US.

Feeling good about the progress and rejuvenated by our trip, I quickly wrapped up Chapter 8, on my return to the states.

Chapter 9 Integrating with 3rd Party Systems -- Drive Crash!
I was really feeling good again at this point. System integrations are a particular specialty of mine and I had an existing library of material that I was pretty quickly able to work into half of a completed chapter. I put in some extra time during the evenings and had most of the coding samples quickly completed. Then ene night, as I was packing up, I notice that my laptop which should have been fully charged was showing a low battery. When I get home, the computer wouldn't boot. The battery had died and somehow this caused a nearly complete wipe of my SSD drive. While I had backups, I had done so much work in a short period of time that I didn't really have a good backup of the materials for Chapter 9. Even more disruptive was taking the time to rebuild and reload the computer and restore my files. I went from finally being caught up with the schedule to being 2-3 weeks behind. My take away from this was, you can always improve your backup system, even after 15 years working in IT.

I managed to rewrite everything and get it out the door. I think I rushed it a bit trying to get back on schedule; this chapter ended up being one of the ones I spent the most time editing later.

Chapter 12 Pagelib -- Back on Track
Thankfully, our CEO has been very supportive of the book effort. He agreed to give me half a day per week during work hours to work on the book. This got me back on track to deliver the book on schedule. Chapter 13 was remarkable in that it was probably the only chapter in the book that we didn't end up tight on space. While pagelib is a core library, it is pretty simple. Mike and I actually recommended this as most easily cut from the book, when we thought we were going to have to delete a chapter. Luckily, we were eventually able to get the entire book into the print edition.

Chapter 14 Web Services-- Writing on Christmas Break
It was getting down to the wire. I was confident that there was enough time to get all the writing finished. Especially, since we had a block of time off for Christmas and later for New Years Eve. We had a major snow storm hit during this break and I recall not leaving the house for about 4 days and a final marathon coding/writing session finishing at 2 AM. I managed to submit the last chapter 2 days before our final deadline for the book. I can't tell you how much of a relief it was to finally hit send on that last chapter, especially considering how far behind I was just a few chapters into he book.

In the next and final part, I talk about the production process.

Interview with Packt

I recently did an interview with the staff at Packt Publishing, the publisher of Moodle 1.9 Extension Development.

Packt: Your book is published now. How is the feeling of being a published author?
Jonathan: I don't think it has totally sunk in yet. I feel a tremendous sense of accomplishment. I have wanted to be a writer since I was twelve years old. Mike and I worked tremendously hard over the past year to put the book together. It was especially difficult putting together all the coding examples. Once the coding was finished for a chapter the writing was relatively easy. I feel really good that while it was a difficult process, that I was able to accomplish our goal of writing a great book on how to customize Moodle via its extensible plug-in model.
Packt: What benefits did writing a book bring to your specialist area?
Jonathan: The most direct thing that comes to mind is how much I learned over the course of researching and example creation for the book. Its very much like the saying that you have to teach it to truly learn a subject. I think writing a book on a subject, brings that idea to an even higher level. Longer term this is one more indication of the level of both my personal expertise as well as that of our company Remote-Learner provides in the Moodle space.

See the rest of the interview at http://authors.packtpub.com/content-/interview-jonathan-moore-author-moodle-1-9-extension-development

A Year of Writing Moodle 1.9 Extension Development - Part 2

Part 2: The First Half of Writing
This is the second of a four part series on my experiences writing my first book, Moodle 1.9 Extension Development. The book was co-authored by Mike Churchward. The four parts are detailed below:

• Part 1: Getting a book deal
• Part 2: Writing the first half
• Part 3: Writing the last half
• Part 4: Post writing production

Chapter 1 Architecture of Moodle -- Writing Fitness
This is when the true realization of how much work this was going to be started to set in. Intellectually, theoretically, I knew it was going to be a lot of work, but this was when reality started to set in. With researching, coding, writing, and work, it was going to be hard to keep with the schedule.  This first chapter felt a bit like that first two weeks on a new fitness program after being a couch potato all winter. I had to develop some writing fitness and fast.

Packt provided a really nice chapter template that let us focus on writing. There was a learning curve during the first few chapters on how to properly mark the styles of sections and format the document, but the template generally made everything look really nice and professional without a lot of effort. I remember my wife commenting on the first chapter printout, "Hey this looks like a real book!"

Mike and I worked on the first chapter together and still managed to miss our scheduled delivery date by about half a week. It was hard work but enjoyable. We ended up double writing a few sections and decided to write individual chapters going forward.

Chapter 2 Blocks -- Smooth Sailing
I started to feel some writing fitness at this point and developed some good habits. The writing started to be a nice stress reliever at the end of the day. I was able to split the writing up into chunks of 30-45 minutes. There was pretty good documentation on how to write blocks and I had lots of good examples. The coding took a lot more time than I expected, but because of working on it a little bit every day, I was able to turn it in ahead of schedule. In hindsight, this was the first sign of just how hard the code samples were going to be. We really wanted a hands on book that would cover original coding projects as a learning tool. We did not just want to copy lines of code from Moodle and give a dry explanation of what they did. This meant a lot of coding and testing on top of writing.

Table of Contents -- A Marketing Tool
This is about the time we received our first editorial feedback. I was pleasantly surprised that the requested changes were pretty easy to accomplish and we had mostly been applying the styles and formatting correctly with the template document. There were also some very specific instructions for taking screenshots and creating figures that we seemed to be doing correctly.

My major take away, which is obvious in hindsight, is the importance of the table of contents in selling a book. A lot of the feedback came on the proper way to name section titles so that they made the table of contents interesting and engaging. As soon as I read this, I immediately thought of how I decide whether to purchase a book. After reading the description, I immediately go through the table of contents. It's common sense, but Packt had down the mechanics of how to make the TOC engaging and they were able to distill it down to 3-4 recommendations.

Chapter 4 Activity Modules -- The Schedule Goes off the Rails
At this point I was feeling really good. I was enjoying the writing and managed to work diligently during Chapter 3 and got ahead of schedule. I even managed to get an early start on Chapter 4. Everything went downhill from there. I ended up with a perfect storm of issues:

1) Creating activity modules is considerably harder than other plugin types and many of the areas I wanted to cover such as course backup and restore did not have a lot of source material.
2) Renovating house for sale. Remote-Learner had opened a Kansas City office about 9 months earlier. I had rented an apartment so we could move to KC to oversee the launch. My lease was coming up for renewal and I had major renovations to complete on my old house before it could be sold. We wanted to buy a new house in KC rather than staying in an apartment for another year, but did not want to have two mortgages.
3) 150 page RFP for work. I was put in charge of putting together a major RFP that ended up being 150 pages in length (a book in its own right).

What followed was 4 months of the most intense work on all three of these fronts. Needless to say, I was very behind schedule by the end of this process. Luckily, Mike was able to keep moving forward with his chapters.

It took about 3 months of development in my spare time to complete activity Foo!, my example activity module for the chapter. Coding and testing truly took a phenomenal number of man hours.

Now, I faced a new challenge. Just printing the source code alone would have been 65 pages and we only had 24 pages allotted for this chapter. Up until this point, I had been able to cover every line of code in the samples as part of the chapter text. It took another painful effort to review the code base and boil it down to a 30 page chapter. I think all in all that this chapter is better and more readable for the effort.

In part 3, I cover writing the second half of the book, including what it's like to write on the beach in Belize.