The test_quiz_statistics_report unit test covers the basic locking an timeout behaviour. Synthetic tests To test how the behaves to the user, you can use the attached test_stats_lock.php CLI script to simulate a lock: Set up Create a course with a quiz. Navigate to the quiz. create a question within it (any type is fine) Make a note of the quiz cmid (id parameter in the URL). Place test_stats_lock.php at the root of your Moodle codebase Test 1 - Question bank In a terminal, run `php test_stats_lock.php -q= cmid ` with the cmid you noted in the set up. Wait until you see the message "Holding for 120 seconds or until Ctrl+C is pressed." Go to the "Question bank" tab. The page should load immediately without waiting for the lock. Wait for the script to timeout or press Ctrl+C in the terminal to release the lock. Test 2 - Statistics page lock Go to the "Results" tab and select "Statistics" in the tertiary navigation. In a terminal, run `php test_stats_lock.php -q= cmid ` with the cmid you noted in the set up. Wait until you see the message "Holding for 120 seconds or until Ctrl+C is pressed." Set "Calculate statistics from" to "all attempts" and press "Show report" You should see a progress bar with the message "Waiting for task in progress. Please wait or try again later." Press Ctrl+C in the terminal to release the lock. The "Please wait" message should disappear and the page should continue to load. Test 3 - Statistics page timeout Go to Site Administration > Plugins > Activity modules > Quiz > Statistics report. Set "Statistics calculation lock timeout" to a low value like 10 seconds. Navigate to the quiz go to the "Results" tab and select "Statistics" in the tertiary navigation. In a terminal, run `php test_stats_lock.php -q= cmid ` with the cmid you noted in the set up. Wait until you see the message "Holding for 120 seconds or until Ctrl+C is pressed." Set "Calculate statistics from" to "all attempts" and press "Show report" Wait for the timeout set in the admin settings to expire. You should see the error message, "Could not complete the statistics calculation. There may be a long-running calculation in progress. Please try again later." If debugging is enabled, you should also see a debugging message. Go to Site Administration > Plugins > Activity modules > Quiz > Statistics report and reset the timeout. Real-world tests If you have a large enough quiz enough attempts that the statistics calculation takes a significant length of time, you can do a more realistic test. If you don't have one you can set one up with the following steps, which resulted in a 30 second calculation process on my machine, although it takes a long time to generate the data. Set up Go to Site Administration > Development > Make test course. Create an L-size course (this takes a while). Restore the attached 10-question-quiz.mbz to the course and make a note of the cmid. Place the attached test_big_stats_calc.php in the root of your moodle codebase, and run `php test_big_stats_calc.php --quizcmid= cmid --attempts=10000`. This will generate 10000 attempts at the quiz. This takes a long time. You may want to create a snapshot of your database at this point so you can roll back to re-run the tests. You can also re-attempt the quiz as any student before each test scenario to trigger the recalculation. Test 1 - Question bank If needed, reset the database or re-attempt the quiz. Navigate to the quiz Go to the "Question bank" tab. The page should load immediately, and show an empty or N/A result in the "Needs checking?", "Facility index" and "Discriminative efficiency" statistics columns. In the terminal run `php admin/cli/adhoc_task.php "--execute=\quiz_statistics\task\recalculate"` Wait until you see the message for your quiz, "'...re-calculating statistics for xxx attempts". Reload the Question bank page. The page should load immediately, and show an empty or N/A result in the statistics columns. Wait for the scheduled task to complete. Reload the Question bank page. The page should load immediately, and show 0.00% in the "Facility index" column. If you've used a real quiz with actual answers in the attempts, you may see some real statistics here instead. Test 2 - Statistics page lock If needed, reset the database or re-attempt the quiz. Navigate to the quiz Go to the "Results" tab. In the terminal run `php admin/cli/adhoc_task.php "--execute=\quiz_statistics\task\recalculate"` Wait until you see the message for your quiz, "'...re-calculating statistics for xxx attempts". Select "Statistics" in the tertiary navigation You should see a progress bar with the message "Waiting for task in progress. Please wait or try again later." Wait for the scheduled task to complete The "Please wait" message should disappear and the page should continue to load. Test 3 - Statistics page timeout If needed, reset the database or re-attempt the quiz. Go to Site Administration > Plugins > Activity modules > Quiz > Statistics report. Set "Statistics calculation lock timeout" to a low value like 10 seconds. Navigate to the quiz go to the "Results" tab. In the terminal run `php admin/cli/adhoc_task.php "--execute=\quiz_statistics\task\recalculate"` Wait until you see the message for your quiz, "'...re-calculating statistics for xxx attempts". Select "Statistics" in the tertiary navigation. Wait for the timeout set in the admin settings to expire. You should see the error message, "Could not complete the statistics calculation. There may be a long-running calculation in progress. Please try again later." If debugging is enabled, you should also see a debugging message. Go to Site Administration > Plugins > Activity modules > Quiz > Statistics report and reset the timeout.