During my work on Plone "trunk" in the last year, I kept posting some fancy graphs showing the speed improvements for rendering pages. Much has happened since I last posted one of these in March 2009.
The newly coined Plone 4 is almost ready for a beta release and some companies have started using the alphas for production projects. Overall it's snappy, fun and stable. But how does it stack up against my experimental work? I got the good old ZPTDebugger out and optimized some more rough edges during the weekend and squeezed out another 10%. See the result for yourself:
Compared to Plone 3.3 Plone 4.0 is about 50% faster, ranging from 30% for edit pages up to 70% for anonymous page views. If you use the Chameleon template engine, you get two to three times the speed compared to 3.3.
As a little experiment I trimmed down the default content, portlets and viewlets in a 4.0 site to match what I had done in my experimental work. So I removed all portlets, hid the section, personal bar, site actions and content history viewlets and measured again. In the Chameleon setup you get the same kind of results as I did back in March. For anonymous page views, we are roughly at 50 requests / second. Removing all those elements might sound somewhat odd, but if you don't need some of these features or use xdv to supply some of these elements as static HTML, you can actually get close to these numbers.
It's good to see my work finally in the mainline and available to all. Now onwards to the next adventure, making Plone easier to use and develop for :-)
P.S. The controlpanel stats are indeed correct, though they look pretty odd. I didn't try to find the cause of the slowdown compared to all other page types.
