Plone System Requirements

Operating System Platform

Basic Plone deployment supports multiple platform to run it, which includes both Windows, and *Nix variations such as Linux and MacOS. However, many Plone add-ons, such as the DocumentViewer, and PDF Exporter requires *Nix specific tools and services. Therefore it is recommended that Plone is deployed on a Linux based system.

Memory / RAM

Zope and Plone have a rather high base memory footprint. This is due to it loads a huge amount of Python code to run, and also objects are usually cached inside the Zope instances.

For a cluster with 1 Varnish, 2 Zope instances, and 1 ZEO instance, we recommend at least 2GB of RAM for optimal performance. The more RAM is better.

A single cluster can serve multiple Plone sites, and RAM requirement usually does not grow too far from the base requirement unless there are memory-heavy add-ons installed. This lowers the requirement when using a single deployment to serve multiple sites.

System Tools and Libraries

These are the required tools and development libraries required:

  • Python 2.6 (for Plone < 4.2) or Python 2.7 (for Plone > 4.3)
  • Python development libraries
  • libjpeg-devel
  • zlib-devel
  • bzip-devel
  • libxslt-devel
  • libxml2-devel