I have a client that I set up on Plone about 9 months ago. It was a substantial amount of work moving them over to Plone, what with having to make a skin and copy all of the pages into Plone pages. It was all towards making my life easier in the long run, because, in theory, the users would be able to add their own news items and events.

For the first few months this was “sort of” working, but somewhere along the line I started having problems with Zope hanging, and hogging the processor and memory. Now it is at the point where this is happening hourly.

I have played with caching, session timeouts, and packing the ZODB, and anything else I can think of, but the site still seems to hang. The error logs are not helpful as they don’t give any indication that I can see as to what is causing the hanging.

So I decide to try to upgrade to the latest version (Plone 3 – I’m running 2.1). So I install a newer version of Python (2.4.4), and a new version of Zope (2.10), and finally I try to import and migrate one of my sites into the new instance. 2 hours of torture later I find that Plone 3 changed the way it handles its workflows and it is completely incompatible with the way that they were handled in Plone 2.5 and lower – so none of my add-on products will work (including the Forum, Ploneboard).

Well, so much for Plone 3. I guess I won’t EVER be upgrading to that one.

So what about Plone 2.5. Okay.. same deal. Installed different version of Zope (2.9.7) as recommended, then tried to import and migrate the site… But again – since Plone 2.5 changes the way it handles user accounts in an incompatible way, I need to uninstall the CAS module that I use for authentication…. Not today..

So I decide that maybe i just need to install the same version.. So I reinstall Zope 2.8.7, and Plone 2.1.4 and move the ZODB over to this new instance… It appears to be working ok for the first few minutes… however.. an hour later, it too is locking up.

So maybe it’s Python. I install Python 2.3.5 again in its own folder, then install Zope 2.8.7 on top of it, then I try to run my site on this instance…. Oh… but some of the extensions that I had compiled into my other Python 3.5 still need to be compiled in… so I compile/install PIL – seems to work ok — but then it comes to MySQL-Python so that I can access a MySQL database from Plone. This I spent 8 hours on, as there were missing libraries and header files.

Finally when I get it installed, this instance just locks up before I can even do anything…

Perhaps I’m not “smart” enough to run Plone.

I have been fed up with Plone before but keep on persisting because of all of the great features it appears to have. However, the single most important feature for me is that the site stays running. I’m at the end of my rope and really don’t know what to do at this point other than restart the server every hour until I manage to port the site back to PHP – a technology that just works!