Server Requirements: No Need for a High-End Server!

The following list should give you an impression on what kind of server you will need if you want to install OLAT. Here are some general tuning tips:

1. Use fast RAM. Be aware that fully buffered memory (FDIMMS) are usually slower than normal DIMMS. Use FDIMMS only if you really need a lot of memory in your server. If you run OLAT with only 4GB, there is no need for FDIMMS.
2. Use fast disks. Normally the bottlenecks in OLAT are IO operations; faster disks can deliver more data.
3. If you use a hardware RAID controller, you can enable a disk cache that will speed up things quite a bit. But be aware that this can cause loss of data in case of a hardware or power failure. In addition be aware that XFS does not immediately write data to disks!
4. If you have no performance problems, run OLAT, MySQL and OpenFire on the same server. The first thing you might want to separate is the OpenFire server with its database.

University of Zurich (UZH)

Probably the biggest OLAT installation can be found at the University of Zurich:

• OLAT Installation: 57'000 registered users, 2'900 authors, about 3'800 courses, max. 1'100 users at the same time, 1.5h Sessiontimeout
• Hardware/CPU:
  • Clustered setup with 4 Machines
    • 1 Frontend with Apache, Shibboleth, Jabber server, 1 OLAT Tomcat running
    • 2 Machines with 5 Tomcats running
    • 1 Backend with MySQL
  • Each Machine is a PowerEdge M605 from Dell
    • 2x CPU's Quad-Core AMD Opteron, 64Bit, 2.7GHz
    • 16GB RAM
  • Filesystem NFS
    • 4x Gigabit Interface
• Software/OS: Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS Hardy, Java 1.6, Tomcat 6, MySQL 5.0.51, Apache 2.0, Openfire 3.64
• Configuration:
  • Apache MaxClients = 2'000
  • Tomcat (VM Options) -Xss 256k -Xms 2560m -Xmx 2560m
  • Tomcat (server.xml) = MinProcessors set to 10 and MaxProcessors 1000 set to
• Used disk space:
  • 350 GB eContent/Data
  • 900 MB DB Dump
  • Tivoli Storage Manager for Backup

frentix GmbH

frentix GmbH is the main commercial OLAT provider in Switzerland.

• OLAT Installation: Multiple installations on multiple servers with up to 15000 registered users and up to 400 users at the same time
• Hardware/CPU
  • Intel Xeon X3460, 8x2.8 GHz, 16 GB RAM, 1 GBits LAN, 1 TB disks (Raid 10)
  • AMD Opteron 1218, 2x2.6 GHz, 8 GB RAM, 100 MBits LAN, 2x500 GB disks (Raid 1)
  • Intel P4, 2x3 GHz, 3 GB RAM, 100 MBits LAN, 2x150 GB disks (SoftRaid 1)
  • 2x Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 64-bit, 2x 2.4 GHz, 4 GB RAM, 100 MBits LAN, 2x150 GB disks (Raid 1)
• Software/OS: OpenSuSE 10.3 / 11.2 64-bit, Java 1.6, Tomcat 6, MySQL 5.1, Apache 2.0 and OpenFire 3.6.3 / 3.6.4
• Configuration:
  • Apache MaxClients = 150
  • Tomcat (VM Options): -Xss256k -Xmx2048m
  • Tomcat (server.xml): maxThreads=150 minSpareThreads=25 maxSpareThreads=75

Bildungsportal Sachsen

BPS Bildungsportal Sachsen GmbH is the main OLAT partner in Germany.

• OLAT Installation: 70’000 registered users with up to 1’500 users at the same time, about 6’500 courses
• Hardware/CPU: 4 virtuelle Server auf VMWare ESX on Dell PowerEdge 6950 64GB RAM, 4xAMD Opteron 8218, 1 GBits internal network and 700 GB FibreChannel Disks
• Software/OS: Scientific Linux 5.5, Java 1.6, Tomcat 6, Postgresql 8.4 , Apache 2.2 und OpenFire 3.5
• Configuration:
  • AppServer Cluster (4xOLAT) and DB-Server Cluster (2xpostgres via pgpool)
  • Tomcat (VM Options): -Xms3G –Xmx3G
  • Tomcat (server.xml): maxThreads = 500
  • Apache: worker MPM, max. 65536 clients

Other Installations?

We would be happy to publish your server data in order to give new users an impression what hardware they will need if they choose OLAT. Just drop us an email with the information listed above. Thanks.