So this is a rather general question and I'm curious as to the experience all of you have had with this. In the case of a client using one or two hundred lessons, each being Articulate SCORM creations and averaging from 25-90 megs per lesson (with various levels of video but all with a ton of VO), with the potential for a thousand or more 'students' to be viewing lessons, have any of you ran into issues where you experience issues with server load and long wait times due to host speed limits?
This is sometimes a tough question to answer because there are other factors . . .
Is the content being stored in the LMS environment itself or on separate servers outside the LMS? If on the LMS, what the load?
Is there any redundancy, such as using multiple content servers with load-balancing?
Where are the users located in relationship to where the content/LMS servers are? Are they all in the U.S.A on a robust internal network or all their widespread around the world, some on networks that can best be called "challenged."
What is the average size of the videos and are they streamed? If not, are they Flash or MP4 videos?
The point being that without knowing the servers and the load on them, this is kind of a tough question to give a ballpark answer to.
Also, the user's PCs and their browsers can sometimes be an issue also.
Thanks for the response Gerry. I know that tends to be a pretty open ended question and certainly not one that there is black and white answers to.
This case would involve a standard paid Moodle hosting account where you pay yearly for either a shared or private server. Lets look at a private server situation, this costs you a bit more but you don't have to worry about other accounts impacting your ability to provide content. If we are dealing with a single server that will store and host several hundred Articulate courses (all with lots of VO) and then possibly thousands of users, just doing the math seems to indicate that upload speed from that single server might cause it to have issues during times of heavy use. Looking at this example in a very scaleble way where we could be talking down the road about 500 courses and 2000 students I would suspect a single server situation is not going to work. Our client in this case is not going to be hosting their own LMS and will be relying on a paid hosting account to handle their Moodle install.
To answer some of your other questions the content will be eventually viewed by people all over the world so obviously some of those cases users can expect poor performance just because of connection stability and speed on their ends but there isn't too much I can do about that. Video's used will be occasional and typically only a couple megs in size (at least initially) so I don't view that as a major issue starting out.
In regard to your comment about storing the content outside the LMS, is that actually even possible and still utilize SCORM standards without having to tear apart the Articulate publish file and modify the HTML code and XML data for proper paths to point to a more capable CDN (content delivery network)?
In regard to your comment about storing the content outside the LMS, is that actually even possible and still utilize SCORM standards without having to tear apart the Articulate publish file and modify the HTML code and XML data for proper paths to point to a more capable CDN (content delivery network)?
That depends on the LMS. I know of one LMS--Saba--which we use--that permits this.
AICC on remote content servers is easy in Saba (once things are configured properly for having content stored in Saba environment). Just enter the URL to the content or import the 4 AICC files (with the URL to the content in the .AU file) and away you go. We first got AICC to work and then load-balanced three external content servers to act as one to handle the load.
For SCORM, we had to install a Java app server on the content server, along with some additional Saba software, and then configure it correctly so the Saba LMS would think the remote SCORM server was part of its domain. works like a charm for SCORM.
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This is sometimes a tough question to answer because there are other factors . . .
Is the content being stored in the LMS environment itself or on separate servers outside the LMS? If on the LMS, what the load?
Is there any redundancy, such as using multiple content servers with load-balancing?
Where are the users located in relationship to where the content/LMS servers are? Are they all in the U.S.A on a robust internal network or all their widespread around the world, some on networks that can best be called "challenged."
What is the average size of the videos and are they streamed? If not, are they Flash or MP4 videos?
The point being that without knowing the servers and the load on them, this is kind of a tough question to give a ballpark answer to.
Also, the user's PCs and their browsers can sometimes be an issue also.
Thanks for the response Gerry. I know that tends to be a pretty open ended question and certainly not one that there is black and white answers to.
This case would involve a standard paid Moodle hosting account where you pay yearly for either a shared or private server. Lets look at a private server situation, this costs you a bit more but you don't have to worry about other accounts impacting your ability to provide content. If we are dealing with a single server that will store and host several hundred Articulate courses (all with lots of VO) and then possibly thousands of users, just doing the math seems to indicate that upload speed from that single server might cause it to have issues during times of heavy use. Looking at this example in a very scaleble way where we could be talking down the road about 500 courses and 2000 students I would suspect a single server situation is not going to work. Our client in this case is not going to be hosting their own LMS and will be relying on a paid hosting account to handle their Moodle install.
To answer some of your other questions the content will be eventually viewed by people all over the world so obviously some of those cases users can expect poor performance just because of connection stability and speed on their ends but there isn't too much I can do about that. Video's used will be occasional and typically only a couple megs in size (at least initially) so I don't view that as a major issue starting out.
In regard to your comment about storing the content outside the LMS, is that actually even possible and still utilize SCORM standards without having to tear apart the Articulate publish file and modify the HTML code and XML data for proper paths to point to a more capable CDN (content delivery network)?
That depends on the LMS. I know of one LMS--Saba--which we use--that permits this.
AICC on remote content servers is easy in Saba (once things are configured properly for having content stored in Saba environment). Just enter the URL to the content or import the 4 AICC files (with the URL to the content in the .AU file) and away you go. We first got AICC to work and then load-balanced three external content servers to act as one to handle the load.
For SCORM, we had to install a Java app server on the content server, along with some additional Saba software, and then configure it correctly so the Saba LMS would think the remote SCORM server was part of its domain. works like a charm for SCORM.
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