File size of course presentation, can it slow down server performance?

Hello,

I have a set of powerpoint presentations that I use to teach an online blended course. I want to convert these powerpoint presentations to the H5P course presentation activity type. What I will do is save the powerpoint slides as images and upload them to an H5P course presentation activity one by one, however, I am concerned that this may slow down server performance as h5p activities are stored on my website server, right? 

I know this will depend on the size of the files I include in the course presentation (images/audios, etc), but I thought that maybe H5P file sizes are smaller than other software files (such as powerpoint) since they are HTML5 files. Is this correct? 

I would also appreciate if somebody can inform me about this other issue: I normally teach classrooms of 18 students, would it be possible if all 18 students go to my website at the same time and work on the H5P course presentations? I remember in the past there were occasions where the content would no upload for some students. Is this to do with the fact that they are all accessing my website at the same time using the same internet connection? How can I avoid this from happening? 

Any help of guidance regarding the above questions would be much appreciated. 

Thanks!

Nuria

Content types: 
otacke's picture

Hi Nuria!

Sorry for not answering earlier.

If you create H5P interactions on your own server, they will be stored there as well. Correct.

It's hard to predict the file size without more detail. And yes, H5P is based on HTML5, but this is hardly related to the file size. If you just convert PowerPoint slides into images and put them into a course presentation, this may or may not result in an even larger file size compared to PowerPoint depending on the image format, backdrops, compression, other content included, etc.

Your students can all work with the same course presentation at the same time. That's done on the clients, so once the content is downloaded, your server will idle. Before that however, it will be working quite a bit to serve the requests, especially for Course Presentation which uses a lot of other libraries. The total file size should play a minor role here with respect to computing power, but might be more demanding for data transfer.

If you meant editing content at the same time (you mentioned some upload): That should not work for the same course presentation at all, because there's no collaborative editing feature so far.

I read about using H5P served by a Raspberry Pi in a school class recently, and I asked the author about performance problems -- he had none. But this will totally depend on what content types you use and how many media elements of what kind you include. If you want to go for Course Presentation, it will be more time consuming to create them from scratch, but then the file size will be really smaller than using one image per slide (unless you have an individual backdrop image for each slide). This will not help much if your server's computing power is the bottleneck, but if it's the connection. In general, limiting the number of simultaneous connections might help.

Best,
Oliver

Hi Oliver,

Thank you for a very useful reply. I find that the file size can be reduced considerably by compressing the photos of the slides. When most of the slide is text, I will just add text to the course presentation instead of using the photo of the powerpoint slide. I will give it a go and see if my school connection is strong enough and won't take too long to load the course presentations. Thanks again! :)

otacke's picture

You're welcome!

dgcruzing's picture

Yes, an interesting topic. 

Especially since the new h5p.com is coming online plus the settling down of the Moodle Mobile apps. 

I have been playing a bit these last few days with it as setting back into development over the coming months on new courses resources. 

Plus the change over to M3.5. 

Here is a bit of a discussion on it and it will include the ability to live stream H5P to the Mobile app. 

https://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=373644&parent=1506434

The ability to actually do away with PPT's and use internal or external H5P activity would fix a lot of tutors figuring out how to present. (and as alluded to the ability to seamlessly present in the mobile app).

Of note, also keeping an eye on the new web pix compression methods that are coming to fruition. (The battle of Compression -not sure if anyone watched the Silicon Valley TV series but a lot like this going on at the moment which is good for us end users)

https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/performance/optimizing-co...

A copy of useful tools and sites.. 

https://tinyjpg.com/

and my go-to on desktop tool.. 

Coffeecup free PxConverter

https://www.coffeecup.com/pixconverter/

otacke's picture

Thanks for the additional suggestions!