[Wylug-help] Appalling Zope/Plone performance: what have I missed?

[felix at chaptereight.com]

On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 02:18:55PM +0100, Dave Fisher wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Yep, I fell for Felix's recent Plone pitch.

Glad to hear it.

> So I installed the debian Zope and Plone packages and the default setup
> worked pretty well (if a bit slowly) out of the box on a local machine.
> 
> Unfortunately, any attempt to access my instances of either Zope or
> Plone from the outside world timeout.

Are you saying there's no access from outside whatsoever, or very slow 
access?  The usual practice for any real sites is to put Zope behind 
Apache.

> There's nothing in my system security preventing access, the HTTP
> request is clearly being accepted, I'm not getting any error messages
> and LAMP applications perform speedily on the same system.  The only
> other thing I notice is that top shows 6 Python processes each consuming
> 40% of my memory.

Zope and Plone is typically slow to start with, for the first few (say 
10) requests, while it builds up its memory cache, but should certainly 
be responsive once up and running.  As an example, it runs quickly 
enough on my home PC (a PII 400MHz with 300M RAM), though I don't serve
any real sites off it.

Felix.