eZ Publish: Performance Best Practices
Friday 28 April 2006 1:10:00 am
Planning is a major contributor to the success of a project. As with any sophisticated Content Management System, projects based on eZ Publish benefit from early planning and a complete understanding of the tasks that need to be performed.
Defining the scale of the project and listing the tasks associated with each project phase is critical to successful implementation. Performance is part of this planning process because it is a basic requirement. Performance expectations must be clearly defined using relevant criteria. Meeting these criteria is a "best practice" technique for designing the right solution for a customer.
| Criterion | Description |
|---|---|
| Simultaneous visitors | How many users will browse the website at the same time? |
| Page views | How many pages will be displayed in a 24 hour period? |
| Content objects | How many pieces of content aka content objects will be stored in the eZ Publish system? |
| Content updates | How many times per day / hour will site content be added or modified? |
| Simultaneous requests | What is the expected maximum number of simultaneous requests? To what degree should performance be impacted during the peak? (Peak hours usually occur at the same time every day. During these times, the number of visitors on your website can increase dramatically.) |
| Load time | On average, how quickly should eZ Publish pages load? How quickly do you expect eZ Publish to answer requests? 1 to 2 seconds, 0.5 to 1 second, less than 0.5 seconds? |
| Average content size | What is the average size of a page on your website (including external files)? Pages containing large external media objects (such as images) use more resources than pages containing only text. |
Large or mission-critical projects generally require load balancing. Load balancing enables multiple servers to respond to page requests, reducing the load on individual servers and improving the robustness of the system. It is important to design the load-balancing architecture for eZ Publish during the early phases of the project, rather than postponing it until the end.
Defining the performance criteria at the beginning of the project also enables the implementation team to devise tests to validate the system. These tests are not only useful for project acceptance and sign-off; they are also a valuable troubleshooting resource, providing a performance base-line that can be used as a comparison should the system's responsiveness later degrade.