Scott Harrison, freeware volunteer, sharrison@sourceforge.net
For full-time, classroom usage, an adequate LON-CAPA server should be/have:
A lesser machine can be used for toying around with LON-CAPA (LON-CAPA will run for a single user on most any machine).
LON-CAPA servers experience significant peaks of activity before a homework submission deadline. To support these critical peaks of activity, it is strongly advised that LON-CAPA machines fit the above recommendation.
If thousands of students start accessing the box as a web server... well you may want to consider more options. The design of the LON-CAPA system is to naturally and transparently load-balance on multiple computer clusters. So, a simple solution for running an entire college campus is to just have an adequate plurality of LON-CAPA servers rather than a single, particularly monstrous server.
We like to think of high web server usage as "a good problem" though....
LON-CAPA works nicely (for development purposes) on a Pentium II, 20 gigabytes of hard-disk space, 256M RAM, and 400MHz. The consensus is though, that this may only be adequate for a class of a dozen students.
If you are making a serious investment, you should join the LON-CAPA mailing list by visiting http://mail.lon-capa.org/mailman/listinfo/lon-capa-users. By posting to this mailing list, you can learn about the solutions have worked for others.
LON-CAPA works on any Intel-based RedHat-compatible hardware. Unlike other e-learning software systems, it works comparatively well on dusty old crippled machines without much RAM or processing.