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.

Apache

Apache is an HTTP server and it is the front-end to our web site.  It is licensed under the Apache License.  Apache is part of our software stack mainly because we have other web applications that are served directly from it.  We use it's url rewriting feature to forward requests to our main Zope/Plone based web site.

AWStats

AWStats is 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.

Pound

Pound is a load balancer for web servers - is used to distribute requests to multiple back-end zope servers. It is distributed under the GPL. 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.

Squid

Squid is a caching proxy server - is used to cache frequently-requested web pages. It is licensed under the GNU GPL. It 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.

Subversion

Subversion is a version control system. It is used both internally and externally for the open-egov.nngov.com site to manage changes to source code.  It's copyright is an Apache/BSD-style license which is fully compliant with the Debian Free Software Guidelines.

Zabbix

Zabbix isa 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. 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.