Tim Nash wrote at 2008-2-7 13:21 -0800:
From what I have read online, the things that slow zope down are primarily the numerous security checks
In modern Zope versions you can use Zope 3 views. The corresponding templates are trusted. For earlier Zope versions, there is "TrustedExecutables" (they do not yet work for Zope 2.10).
and the large number of objects that need to be written to the zodb when you save a document.
I doubt that the large number of objects is the real reason. The large number of objects result from full text indexing: the object is inserted into the document list for each word it contains. However, full text indexing is slow and expensive - independent from the insertion into the document lists. Obtain a profile and check whether this is really true....
... Has anyone rated the performance of say DTML vs ZPT?
DTML is likely to be faster: it has a C implementation and is simpler than ZPT. I expect a factor of about 4. However, very often the total time is not dominated by the rendering itself but e.g. determining the values that should be rendered. -- Dieter