by Tim Hunt.
Presumably the servers are crashing because the load generated by users is more than the hardware can cope with. That fact that this is happening now, but did not happen in the past, suggest that more people are making more use of Moodle. This would suggest that your IT department should do more, rather than less, to support Moodle.
There are several options:
- Upgrade to a more recent version of Moodle that may have better performance.
- Use the existing hardware more efficiently:
- http://docs.moodle.org/26/en/Performance_recommendations
- Try Linux instead of Windows.
- Once you have upgraded, try different caching options.
- Buy more hardware.
Of course, if your IT department know what they are doing, they will be monitoring the servers, and will be able to answer beyond doubt:
- Whether usage really has been increasing or decreasing.
- What the bottleneck is. Are the servers running out of disc space, memory, CPU power, network bandwidth ... This may also help suggest the right solution.