My website has been offline for a couple of days because I've moved it to a new machine (my old laptop with Debain on it) and have it running behind a Squid server instead.
A Squid server is a superfast cache server that makes a temporary copy of the dynamic site requested and serves that instead. The disadvantage with this is that at least one request will spawn the cache to make a copy; then all consecutive requests will be run from Squid instead of Zope.
So if my site is ever slashdotted it should be able to handle the load (...better).
There are still some settings I need to tweak about with to get exactly the kind of caching I need and want. One problem is the laptop that is now my webserver. It is a weak Celeron 500 with 192Mb of RAM, so the performance will still be pretty poor no matter what I do.
Another advantage with having Squid set up like this is that I can easily define all the virtual hosts for my sites (I use pyredir) but also for stuff like images. One hope is to be able to have all photos run off the filesystem and by doing that I'll be able to serve the raw images from a different web server (something really fast like thttpd)
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