October 9, 2023, by Ben Atkinson

Moodle Degradation

Posted on behalf of central Learning Technologies. For more information please contact learning-technologies@nottingham.ac.uk. 

You may have noticed over the last few days, we have encountered several instances of degraded service to our Virtual Learning Environment (Moodle). This blog post aims to inform you about the situation, the ongoing investigations, and the steps we are taking to address these issues.

On the 22nd of September, the 26th of September, the 3rd of October, and most recently on the 9th October, our Virtual Learning Environment experienced patches of degraded service. These incidents have been of concern to us, as they disrupted the learning and teaching activities of our students and staff. 

Our technical teams have been investigating the root causes of these service degradations. As of now, investigations are still ongoing, but we would like to share some preliminary findings.

Early indications suggest that core components of our Moodle infrastructure is becoming overloaded and not gracefully failing over, the cause of this is still key to our investigations.

In response to these incidents, we have taken immediate action to alleviate the situation. Our technical teams have made changes to both monitoring, to improve visibility of the root cause, and changes around the impacted component to improve its resiliency.

We have engaged with both internal and external experts, to assist us in the investigation and resolution of these issues. Their expertise and experience will help us identify and rectify the root causes more efficiently. 

To better understand and manage our VLE’s performance, we are increasing our monitoring of the application. This will enable us to identify root causes of the disproportionate load, ensuring a more stable learning environment for our university community. 

We understand the frustration and inconvenience that these service degradations may have caused to our students and staff. Please accept our apologies and rest assured that we are doing everything in our power to resolve these issues swiftly and comprehensively. 

As we continue our investigations and work towards a permanent solution, we appreciate your patience and understanding. We want to reassure our university community that we take these issues seriously and that this work is top priority for the technical team. 

For more information please contact learning-technologies@nottingham.ac.uk. 

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