Moodle Administrators – Control Quiz start time to limit your server load

Moodle LMS is one of the most powerful & flexible open source Learning Management System (LMS) in the world. The vast collection of more than 2150 plugins allows you to customize the learning experience as per your requirements. In this post, we will discuss about one of the most common problems Moodle administrators face – huge server load when students are starting their quiz attempts.

The Moodle Quiz is being used as the perfect assessment tool as it allows you to create quizzes with flexibility. However, when you have setup the quiz to start at the given time then the server load can shoot up to highest level because of the resource demands. In a quiz with strict time constraints students tend to refresh the page too often, just to make sure if the attempt is available yet. This unnecessarily increases the server load, and is a problem with large number of students.

The Moodle plugin – ‘Delayed attempts in quizzes’ addressed this problem which is faced by many Moodle administrators. The plugin controls the initial access to Moodle Quiz with a randomized delay to reduce the load at the start and end times. By lightly spreading the access of the students the server load decreases dramatically and the overall capacity of your system increases by orders of magnitude.

The plugin can be downloaded from the official repository here. The plugin adds a countdown timer for all students with a random delay of up to 10 minutes. The students need not to manually refresh the page to see the Attempt Quiz Now button.

Have you also faced server load issues when students start their quiz attempt? How did you overcome that? Please share with us in the comments section below.

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