News

Arizona State University recently chose Six Feet Up to optimize their existing Plone server environment. Plone is a powerful open-source content management system used to manage thousands of websites around the world.

The goal of the engagement was to improve response times for the College of Public Programs website.

Six Feet Up performed benchmarking using ApacheBench to establish a baseline for comparison. The results showed that the site, in its original configuration, was serving an average of 35 requests per second. Six Feet Up's Systems Administration team then installed and configured Haproxy and Varnish. Plone CacheSetup and Apache were reconfigured during the system tune-up. ApacheBench results after the changes indicate that the site now serves an average of 128 requests per second - and improvement of 266%.

Lars Noldan, a systems administrator with Six Feet Up, says, "I am very pleased with the results of the new configuration. The new proxy chain of Apache >> Varnish >> Haproxy >> Plone is performing as we expected and has significantly improved site performance at ASU."

According to David Bear, Director of Information Technology Services for COPP, "Anyone considering deploying an open source solution must be prepared for the success curve. Our deployment of Plone has been very successful for the past four years, and because of that success we have created more Plone sites than we planned for. Too much success can sometimes lead to a precipice. Our partnership with Six Feet Up has pointed the success curve up."

ASU and Six Feet Up are now discussing other projects to further improve the Plone hosting infrastructure at ASU.