Does the performance of Zope degrade as the Data.fs get larger? Both on startup time (which I'm pretty sure will degrade) and on respons time, serving a object f ex?
No... Data.fs is only appended to, so I don't think there is any appreciable seeking latency as it grows. You can probably verify this by running speed.py (distributed in lib/python/ZODB/test/speed.py) against a large FileStorage and then against a small one.
Another thing. Have anyone tried to encrypt all data inside the Data.fs file? I mean, encrypted the data so that not even root can access it, only if you have the right passphrase (or whatever) in the management interface are you allowed access to the data.
You'd probably need to rewrite the pickling and unpickling routines used in lib/python/ZODB/Connection.py to dump and load "encrypted" pickles.