Moodle performance profiling and monitoring

When you set up your Moodle system, you will be able to take some initial precautions to optimize the performance of your VLE. However, the real test is when Moodle is in full operation, that is, when the system is under load.

Built-in profiling

Moodle provides some basic profiling information that you turn on under Development | Debugging, where you have to enable the Performance info parameter. This will display information about execution time, RAM usage, number of files in use, CPU usage and load, session size, as well as various filter and caching measures (less information will be shown on a Windows-based installation). The data will be displayed in the footer of Moodle as long as it is supported by the theme in use (for instance, Standard White).

Moodle further supports profiling at PHP level. While this is mainly targeted at developers it may be helpful for administrators to identify bottlenecks in their system. The internal profiling is...