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 ("there is no test like production!").

Built-in profiling

Moodle provides some basic profiling information that you can turn on in Development | Debugging, where you have to enable the Performance info option. This will display information about the 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).

It further displays information on the caches used in the particular page. For each cache, hits, misses, and sets are shown. The caches are highlighted using traffic light colors: red uses up the most, orange some, and green uses up the least amount of resources. This is a rather good indicator...