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

[Dave Fisher]

On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 03:04:06PM +0100, felix at chaptereight.com wrote:
> On Thu, May 26, 2005 at 02:18:55PM +0100, Dave Fisher wrote:
> Are you saying there's no access from outside whatsoever, or very slow 
> access?  

Well, I thought it was ridiculously slow access, but following Jason's
pointer to the relevant log files I'm entertaining the possibility that
access is being blocked at some point that I haven't yet considered.

> The usual practice for any real sites is to put Zope behind 
> Apache.

I hadn't realised that this was 'usual', but I had toyed with the
'tutorial' at:
 
  http://www.cheimes.de/opensource/docs/zope-apache2/

I would have struggled a bit harder to wressle with this howto if I had
realised that it described the 'usual' approach.  There are some obvious
errors in it (e.g. port numbers, debian apache configs, etc).

> 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.

I think the slow startup on internal requests may have been what led me
to assume that the timeouts on external requests were performance rather
than access related.

I'm obviously going to need further study ... it's just a pity that I
don't really have the time for it.

Dave