Making Plone site temporarily static for high traffic peak

Question

We know that on a certain day there is a surge in traffic that goes to the Plone website. The last time this happened, we were not able to pull out enough power from Plone to make it work smoothly.

Now I ask, what tricks could be played to temporarily feed the horde? For instance.

• Converting (part) of a Plone site into static HTML files and disk images serving them through Apache?

• Load the whole site in a very long-life varnish

• Using some CDN service that automatically reflects the site

We can change the DNS address of the site if necessary, but I hope that all this can be achieved using the contact form and other HTTP POST forms that still work (if necessary, we can hide them temporarily)

Answer 1

I would go with a varnish and something like a 60 second TTL. This is enough, because it means that you will receive only a few requests per minute.

You need to thoroughly test that the response headers are set correctly, so you do not have any cache holes that clog Zope. Funkload to the rescue.

Martin