[Zope] RFP: Zope/Plone Performance Audit

[Marshall Mayer]

Good morning/evening,

LiveModern (http://livemodern.com) is a fairly active and visible  
community-oriented Zope/Plone website that is experiencing  
performance problems after a migration from Plone 2.0.5 to Plone  
2.1.4. The site is functioning well after the migration, except for  
performance. But because Zope/Plone is such a complex system, we're  
having trouble finding the performance bottleneck that our visitors/ 
members consistently report ("it's soooo slow").

 From the end user perspective, most anonymous visitors do not see  
performance problems due to our caching scheme. When they hit a page  
that needs refreshing, it can be quite slow however. But where the  
problems really raise their ugly heads is for authenticated members  
(our members contribute all content on the site, so this is a BIG  
problem). Their experience is often very slow, sometimes for  
navigation but mostly for adding/editing content, making the site  
mostly unusable for our content providers. From an administrator's  
perspective, we can see that the CPUs seem to be always working  
overtime.

We're pretty sure we can fix the problem (it's probably a  
configuration solution), if we can just find what's holding the site  
up. We're confident Zope and Plone is up to the task for our site, if  
we can get Zope and Plone (and everything else we have installed to  
increase performance) set up right. We just need some fresh eyes to  
look at the problem, and know it will probably take a bit of your  
time inside our site to find it.

After you review our server setup below, we'd be interested in your  
analysis of our site, and your recommendations on how to increase  
performance. If you are interested in providing this service, please  
respond ASAP with a cost estimate and timeline for your services.  
Those that can complete the analysis and recommendations before  
January 1, 2007 will be given preference.

Marshall

LiveModern Hardware:
* Apple Xserve G5, dual 2.3 GHz PPC G5 processors
* 6BG RAM
* dual SCSI hard drives on RAID
* dedicated T1 connection

LiveModern Software:
* Mac OS X Server 10.4.8, all software updates applied
* Zope 2.8.7, Plone 2.1.4, Python 2.3.5 running behind Apache and Squid
* CacheFu 1.0.1 and ZEO installed
* Main Plone content products include Ploneboard 1.0 and SimpleBlog
* 1M objects in ZODB

LiveModern Traffic:
* 16K registered members
* 40K unique visitors/month and dropping rapidly (from 80K/month 3  
months ago)
* 200K page views/month and dropping rapidly (from 400K/month 3  
months ago)