LMS on GCP - How many students can it support?

[William Tan]

Hi,

I'm installing a WordPress-based LMS (Learning Management System) e-Learning portal on an GCP instance.

The question is - how many students can such LMS support? 1000?

(How many simultaneous database connections does GCP support?)

With Regards,

William

[Boyan (Google Cloud Support)]

Hey William,

I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can, however this really depends on the resources you choose to use and how large your instances will be.

In regards to how many simultaneous database connections are supported, this will generally split up into two options:

1. The first option is to use Google Cloud SQL, instances specifically for databases. I highly recommend visiting the pricing article on these [1] where you will see that there are different tiers of Cloud SQL instances. Just to give you an example, the "D0" tier supports up to 250 maximum concurrent connections and the same is true for "D1" and "D2" instances. However, going for a higher tier such as "D4" provides a maximum of 500 concurrent connections and higher tiers even more, where the "D32" can support up to 4000. The Google Cloud SQL FAQ [2] might also be of use to you.

2. The second option is to run a standard Google Compute Engine virtual machine where you manage almost everything and install your own database. I can't say specifically how many connections each machine-type (you can review the article on machine-types [3] for more info) can handle as I don't have specific stress test results on this topic, but there is no set hard limit. The bottleneck will be resources associated to your servers. However, depending on your usage and requirements you can choose to use a machine-type that has access to more resources and even spin up several of these machines to work together in order to manage your incoming traffic. As this will heavily depend on the actual traffic and what each connection is doing, it is hard to say which machine-type is suitable for you as testing and monitoring is definitely required to get to an ideal setup. The bottom line, is that the platform can handle very large setups and you can use Google Cloud Platform Services in conjunction to achieve that, it just becomes a question of your requirements and the budget you have for your project.

I hope this gives you an idea on how to proceed and figure out what is needed for your deployment.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/sql/pricing

[2] https://cloud.google.com/sql/faq

[3] https://cloud.google.com/compute/pricing#machinetype