Internet access to your Moodle site slow? Untangle to the rescue!

So you've tweaked your Moodle site's performance until your eyes are red from too much online reading. Your network has no bottlenecks, at least that's what your network engineers says. Your network's running on a fast broadband line. However, no matter what you do, the line is still running slow and your Moodle site's loading slowly. Your organisation doesn't have or can't afford a good hardware firewall. After a while, your network is falling prey to students' bit-torrenting and unmonitored video streaming. Your network's grinding to a halt. What's next? Well how about using Untangle?

Untangle won't improve the speed of your Moodle site - which is either on your own private server or on a Web Hosting company's server. Untangle will help you to block unnecessary website surfing and unproductive protocols like (IM, Peer-to-Peer or gaming services). So in effect, your Internet access is controlled. So when your users surf to a Moodle site, the experience is smoother and faster. The free-version is not fool proof, meaning that there are ways to circumvent the blocks, but there's always the premium package that comes at a monthly fee.

Untangle is a software appliance that manages every aspect of network control from content security to web caching, remote access to policy enforcement, all from one simple, drag & drop command center.

Figure 1: The Untangle solution - it's free unless you install some of the premium modules

How I speeded up my Moodle site (two essential tips)

Preface
If you are a Moodle 2.x user (Moodle 2.4.1 is the latest as of now - January 2013) looking to speed up your Moodle production site, you might want to check out Cloudways.com's article entitled "Boosting Moodle Performance - Tips To Speed Up Your Moodle Install", Jonathan Moore's excellent "Why Your Moodle Site is Slow: Five Simple Settings",  Frederic Never's equally magnificent "Make your Moodle courses load faster without fiddling with the server" and Jonathan Moore's "Why your Moodle site is slow: five simple settings".

My article below is still useful, but dated since I was using Moodle 1.9.15 during the time of writing. Anyway, I suppose you reading this because you're desperate for ideas to speed up your slow  Moodle site, right? If that is the case, Random Net Surfer, then you've come to the right place!

Credit: Warner Bros

This article was first posted on Moodle.org here on 15th January 2011. At the end of this post, you will know how to speed up your site with mod_deflate. You will also know how to enable PHP caching for your website by installing eaccelerator. Lastly you will know how to monitor your website's resources with munin graphs.

45 days ago, I started by journey of hosting my own Moodle site on a Web Host company. I started off with shared hosting, got turned off by the slow speeds, then upgraded to Virtual Private Server. The site just chugged along but my students complained that the site would load ever so slowly. Now, 1.5 months later, it's a different story.


I have spent countless hours and days, while others are asleep, surfing the Net feverishly for ways to optimize and to speed up my Moodle site. I've surfed to moodle.org, googled my way through, gingerly typed detailed Linux commands along the way. BTW, I love Linux now.

I've experienced hundreds of emails to and from my Web Host company, had a major server outage, times when my domain didn't load, recovered from a full harddisk due to automated & unmonitored backup files (I can't forget that one!), blank Moodle pages, loss of data, recovery and backups along the way. I survived. But TODAY, I think I've finally got it. Henry Higgens of "My Fair Lady" would say, "By George! I think (s)he's got it!!!". Anyway....here are two reasons why I am SO HAPPY TODAY.

Reason1: My Moodle site FINALLY runs with mod_deflate page compression.
So my moodle http requested pages are compressed before they are sent to the users' web browsers. Benefit: faster loading of pages, less waiting by users for their Moodle pages to load. http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=165904