Frederic Nevers recently wrote an excellent post on his blog about load testing a Moodle learning management application. He provides a step by step guide to assist Moodle developers in assessing how well their Moodle installations perform at high user loads. It is thorough, yet direct in how to set up test scenarios. He even provides two CSV files to use for test users both in your application tables and as a form data set in LoadStorm.

Moodle is a Course Management System (CMS), also known as a Learning Management System (LMS) or a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE). It is the most popular open source application for educators. I think of it as the Drupal of e-learning. There is more about Moodle below, and it’s interesting for load testing because it can support hundreds of thousands of students in large deployments.

8 Steps to Moodle Load Testing

Frederic does a fantastic job of clearly guiding a Moodle developer through the steps of creating a test plan/scenarios/steps, running Moodle load testing, and analyzing the test results.

  1. Upload test users to Moodle
  2. Upload loadstorm.csv file to your LoadStorm account
  3. Build a load test plan
  4. Add the first scenario to your plan (60% weighting)
  5. Add the second scenario (40% weighting)
  6. Add a new load test
  7. Understand the results
  8. Dig deeper to isolate specific performance bottlenecks

The test scenarios are always a key to load testing. Frederic’s tutorial has two simple scenarios.

Scenario 1:

  • User looks at the homepage
  • Logs in
  • Downloads a 500KB resource
  • Logs out

Scenario 2:

  • User looks at the homepage
  • Logs in
  • Downloads a 500KB resource
  • Views a forum
  • Answers a forum post
  • Posts a blog post
  • Logs out

More About the Moodle App

Moodle is ten years old based on it’s first release in August 2002. It has been voted as 2012′s best Course Management System by Over 500 learning professionals from around the world in the Annual Survey of Learning Tools organized by Jane Hart of the Centre for Learning & Performance Technologies (C4LPT). Obviously, the education industry has a different context for performance than us web testing geeks!

Many institutions use it as their platform to conduct fully online courses, while some use it simply to augment face-to-face courses. Moodle has modules for forums, wikis, etc. to build collaborative communities of learning around subject matter. It can handle standard SCORM packages of content and supports assessments, assignments or quizzes.

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