Plone 4 is fast!

Plone 4 is about to be released. It just became beta yesterday and I did a quick experiment. I took Plone4, a custom made skin, xdv to apply the skin, some useful add ons like PloneFlashUpload and collective.plonetruegallery. No chamaeleon for now. Then I added a handful of images and created some pages. All in all a small site, but a real world example as it will go live in a few days.

People already reported on the speed improvement for anonymous access (Hanno and Matt). I can confirm the results. But today I am concerned about the content manager, and editing for the content manager also improved a lot.

I want to test the real world feeling. So to test this, I installed the site at the provider, added nginx and varnish in front. Just standard setups, no tweaking. Also nginx does not add any expires header, but I added a policy in the good old caching_policy_manager. No CacheFu either, as I think there is none yet for Plone4. So I also do not have any etags out of the box.

I do my testing in Firefox with yslow installed to get a second statement when the page is loaded. Here are my logged-in results:

• Loading the text-only start page: 293ms (onload: 990ms)
• Loading a page with an image galery: 442ms (onload: 1.39s)
• Loading the edit form (clicking edit):  1s (onload: 1.26s)
• Made a change and saved: 537ms (onload: 1.4s)

For a content editor, this is a dream-come-true situation.

As a next test, we will try this with a lot of content. The catalog has recently been a bottleneck for us and this makes editing no fun anymore. I am enthusiastic to see what improvements Plone 4 will bring here.