Looking at plone.org to find a way to periodically pack my instance's ZODB I could only find http://plone.org/documentation/faq/how-do-i-pack-the-zodb that doesn't talk about automated packs, but just manually initiated ones.
I know I can simulate the manual pack with wget or curl, but I'd like to know if that is the best practice in use for production sites.
If you are using ZEO you can add the following to your Crontab to do this:
0 1 * * 6 <path-to-buildout>/bin/zeopack
If you don't want to do it manually, add this to your buildout.cfg and the crontab entry above will be added automatically when you run bin/buildout:
parts += crontab_zeopack
# pack your ZODB each Sunday morning and hence make it smaller and faster
[crontab_zeopack]
recipe = z3c.recipe.usercrontab
times = 0 1 * * 6
command = ${buildout:directory}/bin/zeopack