Book Image

Plone 3.3 Site Administration

Book Image

Plone 3.3 Site Administration

Overview of this book

In the past few years, we have seen some dramatic changes in the way Plone sites are being developed, deployed, and maintained. As a result, developing and deploying sites, changing their default settings, and performing day to day maintenance tasks can be a challenge. This book covers site administration tasks, from setting up a development instance, to optimizing a deployed production site, and more. It demonstrates how-to perform these tasks in a comprehensive way, and walks the user through the necessary steps to achieve results.We have divided the subject of Plone site administration into three categories: development, deployment, and maintenance. We begin by explaining how a Plone site is built, and how to start using it through the web. Next, we add features by installing add-on products, focusing on themes, blogging, and other common enhancements. After the basics of developing and deploying a Plone site are covered, the book covers the basics of maintaining it.Further, throughout the book we preview some new technologies related to Plone site administration, available now as add-ons to the current Plone release. Finally, we will cover a variety of techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Plone 3.3 Site Administration
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Load balancing in the context of Plone


Load balancing (in the Plone context) is the process of distributing requests amongst two or more Zope 2 instances, capable of handling the load. There are a variety of tools available to help with load balancing in Plone including Apache, Varnish, HAProxy, and Pound.

Of these, we will focus primarily on HAProxy and Pound, as they provide the most full-featured and flexible implementations.

Installing HAProxy—a load balancer

One popular load balancer is HAProxy (http://haproxy.1wt.eu/).

You may reach for it when you would like a more fully-featured load balancer than Pound (covered a little later, not to impugn Pound's work).

The HAProxy binary

To make installation with Buildout easy, there is a recipe called plone.recipe.haproxy (http://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.recipe.haproxy).

In 06-deployment-optimization-haproxy.cfg, we have:

[buildout]
extends = 06-deployment-optimization-macros.cfg
parts +=
    haproxy-install

[haproxy-install]
recipe = plone.recipe...