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I have to run Moodle production servers in Azure. Need to keep userdata (moodledata folder) in a common location like NFS for better management and scalability. I tried Azure Files-SMB service (premium-SSD). The problem is Moodle website become too slow to operate after I moved 'moodledata' folder to Azure Files.

As Azure SMB protocol is visibly terrible in performance for this application. I need to give a try in NFS. I found somewhere that NFS protocol performs better than SMB in handling files small in size down to KB. Moodle user folder is having thousands of such small files including user session related ones.

I am not familiar with Azure services, looking for an Azure alternative of AWS EFS. I am looking for a step by step guide on how to enable NFS4 in Azure storage account.

Last time I tried, it was asking for something like "Sign Up for NFS on subscription basis". Submitted one survey as part of the "Sign Up", later no idea what happened. Still during Storage Account creation time it shows NFS feature in disabled state. Please help.

If protocol is not really the performance bottleneck here then what else could be?

OS- CentOS-8 DB- Postgresql-10

JineshJK
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  • I have the same issue, did you find a workaround? – Omar JG May 06 '20 at 18:29
  • @OmarJG right now I have an open support ticket with Microsoft Azure. They are analysing the data provided from my test bed. Most probably they may suggest me to go with some cache tweaking I guess. My Plan-B is to go with Redis or Memcache for Moodle-data directory. Will update here. – JineshJK May 16 '20 at 18:52

1 Answers1

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High latency is killing your performance. SMB isn’t designed to work over WAN, NFS isn’t different. Try using SMB cache with your SMB File Share.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/storage/files/storage-sync-files-deployment-guide?tabs=azure-portal

BaronSamedi1958
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