In addition to Zope, Plone, and the Open eGov product the City of Newport News makes use of several other openly licensed packages to scale and monitor our web site.

Squid - a caching proxy server - is used to cache frequently-requested web pages. It is licensed under the GNU GPL. The squid web site can be found at: http://www.squid-cache.org/. Squid is used in conjunction with the CacheFu product that comes packaged with Plone. CacheFu has the capability of invalidating squid's cache. For instance when a content manager modifies a page and publishes it, CacheFu tells squid to remove the old page from it's cache to prevent the public from receiving stale content. See the README.txt file inside of the CacheFu product directory for documentation on how to set up squid to work with CacheFu. Squid is the front-end for our web site. It serves almost 90% of the page requests to our site from its cache.

Pound - a load balancer for web servers - is used to distribute requests to multiple back-end zope servers. It is distrubuted under the GPL. The pound web site can be found at http://www.apsis.ch/pound/. When a web page request can't be satisfied by the squid cache, it is forwarded to the pound server. Pound forwards the request in round-robin style to our back-end zope servers. Pound is session aware so that if a client is logged in to a zope server, it will continue to pass requests from that client to the same zope server. Pound also monitors the status of the backend servers and will stop forwarding requests to one if it goes offline and will resume using it once it comes back online. Documentation on how to set up squid/pound/zope can be found at:http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/simple-zope-clustering-with-squid-and-pound.

ZABBIX - a distributed monitoring server - is used to monitor all of the servers that are part of our web site. It is licensed under the GNU GPL version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation. The ZABBIX web site can be found at: http://www.zabbix.com/. We have ZABBIX configured to send alarms if a server goes down, to alert when our most popular pages are performing poorly, and to monitor statistics such as CPU and memory load.

AWStats - a log analyzer - is used internally against our squid log files to produce statistical analysis for our web site. AWStats is a free software distributed under the GNU General Public License. The AWStats official web site can be found at: http://awstats.sourceforge.net/.