Best practices to increase performance of Plone sites behind Apache

Question

I have a small number of Plone sites running in virtual hosts of an Apache 2.4 server. I have the strong feeling that the performance could be much better.

Let's assume a pretty basic setup for a Plone site:

<VirtualHost *:80>
    ServerAdmin [email protected]
    ServerName www.example.com
    CustomLog /var/log/httpd/vhost-example.log combined
    ErrorLog /var/log/httpd/vhost-example.error.log
    RewriteEngine on

    DocumentRoot /opt/zope/instances/example/htdocs
    ErrorDocument 502 /error-500.html
    ErrorDocument 503 /error-500.html

    RewriteEngine On
    RewriteRule ^/(.*) http://localhost:8080/VirtualHostBase/http/%{HTTP_HOST}:80/example/VirtualHostRoot/$1 [L,P]
</VirtualHost>

In this setup, almost everything is done by the Zope server, listening to port 8080, which runs the Plone site in the virtual folder /example (which lives in the object database).

Now this server provides some static resources, e.g. images and stylesheets (which live in the filesystem), and some pseudo-static resources, like compilations of scripts or stylesheets with a timestamped name (which don't have a filesystem location).

Some static resources have paths which give hints where the physical resource is located (e.g. /++resource++browsername/name-of-script.js, where browsername is the hint); others are taken from so-called skins (i.e. from the first skin which contains them), with no easy way to tell the filesystem location from the skin name (which would not be known from the response anyway).

Such requests would not need to be handled by the underlying Zope server, using one of its threads. What are the recommended strategies to keep away from Zope what Apache could do itself (more efficiently, and without blocking Zope's threads), and to cache contents?

So, a complete solution might include

• mapping of distinct paths of static resources to known file system location, where possible
• trying several locations for static resources which are taken from skins
• caching of generated resources (e.g. HTML pages, or compilations of CSS or Javascript)

and, with ZEO setup,

• load balancing (distribution of requests to a number of ZEO clients which in turn talk to the ZEO server)

Any configuration guides anywhere?

Answer 1

The main purpose of Plone is to provide a multi-user content management system that allows to edit websites collaboratively. The price is dynamic creation of the web content presentation and some loss of speed. If you want small, fast websites which you mostly edit yourself then you might be better off with a generator software that creates static websites for you. Quite a number of them are available both commercially and open source. Having said this, in principle you can combine both dynamically and statically generated content from all sorts of sources behind apache, e.g. http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/urlmapping.html, at any leaf node of the tree structure of the site.