Ok, so I've started playing with running zope in readonly mode. (background: I want to run multiple zopes in parallel, with only one with read-write access to the database. This gives a sort of brutal concurrency, since the changing data is all off in an SQL database (well, ok, in 3 different databases, but let's not get into that)). There's the ZOPE_READ_ONLY environment flag which seems to do the trick - but it _appears_ that the zope application that is then created will not pick up changes to the bobobase without being kicked in the head and restarted. just in case anyone else was wondering... more when I have the loadbalancing working.