Eduvidual and the solution for high server loads

Eduvidual is a Moodle-based learning platform that minimizes the administration effort of digital learning content for schools.

Due to the government-ordered school closures last year, the need for virtual learning platforms for schools increased rapidly in a very short time. During this time, the learning platform of www.eduvidual.at also took on a central role in the area of digital teaching and learning. During a single lockdown, up to 180,000 students and teachers used the learning platform.

This unexpected rapid increase in users soon led to server overload. Our team therefore quickly developed various adequate solutions for Eduvidual to stabilize the server environment. As a result, up to 50,000 users could be active on a single server at the same time.

A particular challenge for Eduvidual during this time was the up to 10,000 files uploaded per day. These files involved, for example, the submission of completed questionnaires as photo files. After uploading, a questionnaire is automatically converted into a PDF document. The teachers can then add annotations directly in the document. For document conversion, we have set up a dedicated server that can handle this massive number of conversions. Since several servers are supposed to work together in this environment, this solution approach was also a special challenge for us. So we at Wunderbyte GmbH are particularly proud of the successful implementation.

Technically, we worked with components such as Moodle, Python, LibreOffice, Rsync, systemd and several others. The stability and reliability of the conversion service was the main focus here. Despite the enormous time pressure, we managed to establish a working system for a large number of documents in a short time. Some usually very stable plugins proved to be an additional challenge. These suddenly became error-prone due to the high server load. Our team was able to successfully adapt the plugins within a short period of time, so that everything is now working satisfactorily again.