[imc-cms] indyplone

[Dave Fregon]

On Sat, 2007-02-10 at 13:33 -0800, ryan wrote:
> Hello Dimitris & João,
> 
> I have never used Plone myself (not yet, anyway, I've been planning to
> install it somewhere to evaluate it for the indymedia cms project.
> However, I've been concerned that *every* summary I've read that
> describes the Plone CMS talks about heavy resource usage and scaling
> difficulties.

This is very true, but more for the un-initiated first time
developer/user of it. most folk with experience of Plone are familiar
with standard setups for it, as these aspects are considered from the
start in the platform. But yes, you are right, Plone likes lots of
memory, but their are standard ways of dealing with that, hence caching
in zope/plone, squid, apache etc. I agree that this is pointed out a lot
in documentation on it, usually, because people expect it to run 'out of
the box' how they want and scale well from small site to massive
rollout, whereas it's more a platform for building a solution, than a
final solution in and of itself. You'll find Plone (and zope) do not
assume most things for the developer, it's left configurable as it's
important aspect, you don't have to 'undo' code to get features you want
to work, you 'implement' them using the architecture provided to do
so .. if that makes sense ..)

> Even Wikipedia says: "High-load production internet sites should not
> run on a setup without using caching via Apache/Squid in front,
> combined with CacheFu Plone product." [1]


Apache is usually on every server ad is better at serving data that
doesn't need to be processed. ZServer the default Zope server aren't
focussed at being as efficient when it comes to large files for example.
Apache is usally in front of Zope as it's more intricately configured,
and running default on most servers on port 80.

One of the sites I have on a 2600AMD 1 gig ram machine serves 1.5million
pages a month ... I have squid running (CacheFu is just like a plugin
for plone for handling caching headers automagically, plus being able to
more fine tune and configure if you want to) There's a few other high
profile sites I am involved with in a shared situation, that were
running a mysql/apache version and having the same problems of load, the
move to integrated squid was something that had to happen, regardless of
the fact they moved to Plone ..

> Have you all tried to do any benchmarking or stress testing on your
> Plone installations? What is your experience regarding scaleability of
> Plone?

I have found it personally very easy, there are deployment scripts for
configuring squid and it's ACL's etc just by a config file, so it's
usually a 10 minute process once squid is installed on a server, to have
it configured for standing between apache and plone.

I think tho it's just very different for someone familiar with the
standard apache/php/mysql.

With current situations where groups I am helping with hosting that
support many Indymedia's, there is a single point of failure being
MySQL. it's a lot harder to 'bring down a site' or configured per
instance of a site, than if they were running as separate instances. I
can configure services quite explicitly on what and how parts of a page
are cached in Plone/zope thru the web, whereas it's a lot harder doing
this with PHP. I can doing caching both inside zope, in squid, and also
apache to fine tune most all parts of the delivery process ..

With Plone installations, I have quite a few servers running up to 30
instances of Zope/Plone on them, that are used extensively during the
day (not incredibly high traffic sites, but not low-level either. I am
involved in one community server hosting a number of Indymedia sites,
which Mysql brings regulary goes down due to load, and thus all the
sites reliant on it. With Zope/Plone, the instance holding the site
would go down, the others left alone.

I'm not saying it's better, just different, your points are valid, but
also their are very standard methodologies to follow to deal with this,
that are actually better on the long run than never being considered
from the start .. integrated into the platform basically ..

With regard benchmarking .. this would depend on the server and setup I
gather? I do it on most sites I run ... usually to optimise rather than
to get a solid representation, due to the fact developer and site admin
configuration choices can change whole aspects of performance.

Dave
> 
> -ryan
> 
> Em Fri, Feb 09, 2007 at 11:17:53PM +0200, Dimitris M. escreveu:
> > Hello João,
> > 
> > you could start by installing a local instance of indycore (the name
> > IndyPlone has been abandoned). In order to do that you first have to
> > install OpenCore in you development box:
> > http://www.openplans.org/projects/opencore/getting-started
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> imc-cms at lists.indymedia.org
> http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-cms
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