eZ Publish: Performance Best Practices

Once a project is running on the production platform, regular monitoring and maintenance are required to ensure that performance continues to be optimal. With a few tools and procedures, it is easy to identify and resolve problems before they impact your users' site experience.

Monitoring

Monitoring tools like Nagios are extremely useful for ongoing site monitoring. They can alert you when the server load is too high, indicating that something is wrong with the system and that your server may not be able to handle peak volume.

If your database and file repository size regularly increases, you should monitor the available disk space. If eZ Publish runs out of disk space, it will not be able to create cache files, store new objects, etc.

The disk space required for content updates and additions depends on the nature of these changes. eZ Publish objects with text content use less disk space (a few kilobytes), XML blocks use slightly more, and images can use much more space, as each size variation of the image will be stored on disk (which means that a 1 megabyte image can use something like 2 megabytes depending on the image settings and usage).

Be aware that cache blocks also use significant disk space (depending on their parameters). For example, if you have distinct cache blocks for each user, the number of cache blocks depends on how many users are registered on your website.

The eZ Publish database can get corrupted under various circumstances. It is a good idea to use the maintenance tools provided by your RDBMS to check its health. For example, MySQL provides commands like CHECK TABLE or REPAIR table to help you detect and fix issues on SQL tables.

Web statistics provide you with valuable information about site traffic. By monitoring site statistics, you are alerted if the website's usage is higher than expected, allowing you to upgrade the infrastructure before volume becomes a problem. AWStats and Webalizer are two examples of web statistics tools. They produce statistics based on your web server access logs that can be viewed via a web interface.

Updates

Even with proper testing, a few bugs will probably appear in the project. Making changes to the project in the production environment is very dangerous. Instead, you should always maintain a development version synchronized with the production website. Fixes and changes can be implemented on the development platform and then moved to production once they have been tested and validated.

eZ systems publishes new versions of eZ Publish on a regular basis. Minor versions of a branch (for instance 3.7.3, 3.7.4) are usually bug fixes and minor improvements, and it is totally safe to upgrade from a version with the same major version number (i.e., 3.7). As with site modifications, it's best to install the upgrade on your development environment first, and then duplicate the installation on the production site once everything has been tested and validated.