Plone slow? How to make a small Plone site go fast!
One of the most overlooked features of Plone is the fact that you can make a simple Plone site go a lot faster without any complicated configuration. How? Just activate plone.app.caching.
Plone 4.1 and above ships with plone.app.caching, but it is disabled by default. Activate it and configure it for Zope-only mode. Even if you don't have a proxy cache like Squid or Varnish in front, plone.app.caching makes a huge difference in Plone's performance. Low traffic sites will immediately experience much faster page-load times, even for logged-in users.
Of course, if you're getting a lot of site traffic, you'll want to invest some additional effort in configuring plone.app.caching more carefuly, along with a "proper" caching proxy server like Squid or Varnish. But a small site doesn't need to go to all this effort to get huge benefits from plone.app.caching. You'll get a 5x (or more) speed up with zero configuration!
If you've got a small Plone site and you're not running plone.app.caching, go give it a whirl, you'll be amazed at how quickly you can make Plone fast!
Note: plone.app.caching requires Plone 4 or newer. If you're using Plone 3 or older, use CacheFu instead.