Guidelines/Tips for Large Scale Quiz

[roath]

Hello, I would like to apply a quiz (over 20 questions) that starts at a pre-determined time and has fixed duration to over 500 students at the same time. Please, could you provide some configuration/setup tips/guidelines in order to prevent errors during and after the quiz submission?

• I've never did any stress test to my wplms platform in order to know the behavior of the server if, for example, all students submit the quiz at the same time. How WPLMS handle failed forms submissions?

I'm still using WPLMS version 3.9 and didn't enable React Quizzes yet. Should I enable individual submission for each question instead of the whole quiz at once? What do you suggest? Thank you in advance. Best regards, Rodrigo

[Diana]

Dear User, It depends on server to server, that how much load it can handle when a bunch of users perform activity on a site. It works like this You have 100 questions in the quiz when the quiz is submitted then the 100 questions will break into 10 groups of 10 questions and then in 1 ajax call 10 questions will be saved. This will continue until you reach the last 10 questions, after this for each question 1 ajax call will be sent to save the answers. If you are using a shared server then you will suffer the problem, and if you are using a dedicated server then it depends on your memory limit. We recommend a server with memory more than 128 mb.

[roath]

Thanks Diana. So it would be less AJAX calls if my quiz had 41 questions instead of 40, for example? 41 questions => 4 + 1 = 5 AJAX calls 42 questions => 4 + 2 = 6 AJAX calls 40 questions => 3 + 10 = 13 AJAX calls? or it would be just 4 calls? Well, my server is a shared server. When a user submits a 4 question quiz for example, the server takes aproximately 10 seconds to acknowledge the submission. I think this is too much, specially if hundreds of other users'll be submitting almost simultaneously. How wplms would handle the quiz form/answers if the submission is unsuccessful? I don't care if the user could try again if the answers are not lost in the process. That's my main concern: lose his answers. If the submission is unsuccessful, the user would surely hit the "BACK" button in the browser to try again. Do you know if his answers would be filled correctly, ready to submit again or they'll all be blank? Thank you again. Regards, Rodrigo

[MrVibe]

In version 3.9.9 use react Quiz, benefits :

1. It does all calculation in browser.
2. 1 API call to fetch question list.
3. 1 API call to save question answers. In between saved answers stored in the browser.

-- if you do not want to enable React Quiz for some reason. Enable Check answers in the Quiz, then you are distributing your load on submission to the entire duration of the quiz. - Yes, the answers is saved in the browser. Do a test in a sample quiz, mark some answers. Then close the browser and re-login and open the quiz, the answers are filled in.

[MrVibe]

Another part to above, we have many big universities posting this requirement. 500 students submitting a quiz can cause a lot of stress on the server and if we plan that most definitely the mysql will fail. We have another alternate provision coming up, for huge quizzes and large number of students submitting simultaneously. The quiz attempts are saved in encrypted json files and can be uploaded to server post quiz attempts as well.

[Author]

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