Speedup: Plone 4 and Caching

Plone 4 is much faster than Plone ever was. But anyway, you want caching in front of it. So I do.

We're using the chain browser -> nginx -> varnish [-> pound] -> Zope -> (ZEO).

Plan is to

1. let the browser cache as much as possible,
2. let varnish cache as much as possible,
3. let Zope purge pages in varnish after update.

With Plone 4 we get a complete new caching infrastructure. Its plone.app.caching and its dependencies plone.caching, z3c.caching, plone.cachepurging and plone.transformchain.

Now, at time of writing, Plone 4 is beta and all caching infrastructure is alpha. To make it work you better take it from subversion. Take your buildout (with mr.developer as usal) and modify it like so:

[buildout]
# ...
auto-checkout +=
#   ...    
    plone.app.caching
    plone.cachepurging
    plone.caching
    z3c.caching
    plone.transformchain

# ...

[sources]
# ...
plone.app.caching = svn https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/plone.app.caching/trunk/
plone.cachepurging = svn https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/plone.cachepurging/trunk/
plone.caching = svn https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/plone.caching/trunk/
z3c.caching = svn http://svn.zope.org/repos/main/z3c.caching/trunk/
plone.transformchain = svn https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/plone.transformchain/trunk/

[versions]
# ...
z3c.form = 2.2.0

[instance]
eggs = 
#   ...
    plone.app.caching

Now let buildout run, (re)start your instance and apply the profile of plone.app.caching (HTTP caching support).

In Plones control panel theres now a new item Caching - here you get verbose instructions how to configure it.

Photo by dugspr at Flickr under CC-License.