[Zope-CMF] Plone Speed

Chris Withers chrisw@nipltd.com
Tue, 14 May 2002 17:42:57 +0100


alan runyan wrote:
> 
> NOTE: I believe the latest Plone has had sigificant speed improvements.

Well, having chatted with AndyD, I think I can give you some clues. From what I
understand, you have a lot of skin layers that are used for categorisation and you find
METAL slow.

Here's an idea: 

The skins tool is not being your friend. For each name you look up in a CMF site, it goes
through each layer until you find it, in the order defined in the skins tool properties,
as the you hit the portal object in the acquisition chain.

Now, that includes METAL macro lookups and REQUEST lookups.

REQUEST is particularly bad, since it is behind the portal object in the acquisition
chain, meaning ALL skin layers will be searched every time it is looked up. To make
matters worse, REQUEST is looked up for every page template and metal macro usage.

Ideas for optimisation: 

1. stop using skin layers for categorisation, it's not what they were designed for ;-)

2. reimplement the skins tool so it is designed to have layers for categorisation ;-)

Maybe Shane can step in here since he may have done some optimisation in this area
already?

cheers,

Chris