Performance Tips

Description

Tips for Plone performance tuning and making your add-on product and customizations faster.

Profiling Plone

Optimizing ZEO and threads

For multicore systems, which basically all production systems nowadays are, you might want to optimize Python threading vs. processes. You may also tune how many Python interpreter instructions are run before doing green thread switches in the interpreter.

Debugging slow threads in production

Memcached as session storage

Storing sessions in ZEO/ZODB does not scale well, since they are very prone to raise ConflictErrors if there is considerable load on the system.

Memcached provides a more scalable session backend.

For more information, see lovely.session add-on product.

Reducing memory usage

These tips are especially critical when running Plone on low-memory virtual private server (VPS). But using the memory tips below, and some filesystem and operating system tweaks, it is also perfectly possible to run Plone on an ARM-based Android stick or a Raspberry Pi. See http://polyester.github.io/

Disable extra languages

Add PTS_LANGUAGES to buildout.cfg to declare which .po files are loaded on the start-up:

[instance]
...
environment-vars =
    PTS_LANGUAGES en fi

Upgrade DateTime

DateTime 3.x and higher use significant less memory than older versions. Pinning it to 3.0.3 (4.x not tested yet) has no known side effects on all Plone 4.1.x and 4.2.x sites, but can give up to a 20-25% reduction in memory use on lower-end hardware/virtualmachines.

Large files

How to offload blob processing from Zope:

Sessions and performance

Write transactions have much worse performance than read transactions.

By default, every login is a write transaction. Also, Plone needs to update the logged-in user’s session timestamp once in a while to keep the session active.

With a high amount of users, you may start to see many ConflictErrors (read conflicts) with ZODB.

There are some tricks you can use here:

ZServer thread count

This specifies how many requests one ZEO front-end client (ZServer) can handle.

buildout sets the default to 2.

Adjust it:

[client1]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
....
zserver-threads = 5

Find a good value by doing performance testing for your site.

Note

Increasing the thread count is useful if your Plone site does server-to-server traffic and your Plone site needs to wait for the other end, thus blocking Zope threads.

More info:

XSendFile

XSendFile is an enhancement over HTTP front end proxy protocol which allows offloading of file uploads and downloads to the front end web server.

More info for Plone support: