Hi, I would like to present you the NEOPPOD project, aiming at improving ZODB Storage scalability. The implementation is in a rather good shape, although it fails at a few ZODB tests at the moment (they are currently being worked on). Scalability is achieved by distributing data over multiple servers (replication and load balancing) with the ability to extend/reduce cluster on-line. Its code is available under the GPL, more information can be found on the project website[1]. One nice aspect is that the underlying protocol is being analysed with model-checking tools based on Petri Nets by a team of post-doc, PhD students and researchers. An article should appear in PETRI NETS 2010 [2]. We hope that NEO will be usable for production systems in 12 months from now, and will notify the community the day we think it is, ie. after using it ourselves. Meanwhile, it can be interesting for research and fun. Contributions are very welcome (extend portability beyond Linux 2.6, replace MySQL daemon dependency with a lighter & embeddable transactional storage, etc). For now, it has been manually confirmed to run Plone and ERP5. Of course, to get the best out of NEO, a Zope application (or ZODB-based application) needs to be designed in a way taking advantage of back-end parallelism (much in the same way that a single-process application cannot take advantage of SMP). We wrote a presentation[3] out of our experience with ERP5 scalability testing & improvement, which might be an interesting read for people developing on the Zope framework. It describes what was the most common mistakes we corrected, and tools we developed to further extend scalability at various levels (NEO being the latest). And for most productions system, ZEO is really great. We have for example used ZEO for now more than 2 years to operate a Central Bank ERP with 300 concurrent users and ZEO never crashed. [1] http://www.neoppod.org/ [2] http://acsd-petrinets2010.di.uminho.pt/ [3] http://www.myerp5.com/kb/enterprise-High.Performance.Zope/view Note: If this mail would fit another list better, please advise. Regards, -- Vincent Pelletier