Choosing a base configuration

by Justin Ryan — last modified Dec 30, 2008 05:52 PM

Based on your needs, available resources, and level of skill and experience, you'll need to make some decisions about what caching configuration to start with in your portal.

When you enter the Cache Configuration Tool in your portal's control panel, you are, first and foremost, presented with four options for a base caching config:

Zope only: This configuration is the simplest, will work with any site, and implements aggressive browser caching policies as well as enabling both of the Zope RAMCache solutions provided by CacheFu, the Page Cache and the Macro Cache, which we will cover in more detail later.
Zope behind Apache: This configuration is the most common, usually on systems where some sites are hosted by Apache and some by Zope. Apache can also be used to control many aspects of HTTP Serving, and even for caching with mod_cache, mod_disk_cache, and a new module called mod_wodan, which we will cover later.
Zope behind Squid: This has shown the best performance of all supported configurations, can be very simple to configure, and is ideal for sites which are entirely served out of Zope / Plone.
Zope beind Squid behind Apache: This configuration is both the most complicated and the most convenient to integrate with hybrid legacy configurations, and performs comparably to Zope behind Squid.

If you are not on a UNIX or Linux system, you may have more trouble getting Squid running than the rest of us, but it should be possible. It is also possible that CacheFu could work with another HTTP Proxy which implements a sufficient subset of the functionality leveraged in CacheFu. Over time, hopefully CacheSetup will become even more flexible and have Out-Of-The-Box (OOTB) support for even more configurations.