Plone Performance Optimisation

We have often come across the situation where a Plone site was originally deployed and has been happily running on its own for a number of years, but as the number of users and amount of content has increased it has become apparent that it needs a bit of performance tuning. This is normally the result of settings or add-on products chosen when the site started are not suitable for the site's increased workload.

Netsight have a lot of experience in Plone performance work (we hosted the 2nd Plone Performance Sprint, here in Bristol in 2008) and can usually diagnose any Plone performance problems in a day or two and that often includes fixing those problems as well.

We have experience in:

• Tuning Plone's database (ZODB) cache 
• Profiling both Plone core and custom code to identify performance hotspots
• Adding caching layers (e.g. Squid, Varnish or Apache) to speed up less dynamic elements of a site
• Clustering Plone using ZEO and spreading Plone over multiple physical servers to increase its capacity