I'm not that familiar with ab, but you don't give a lot of information on your setup here (processor, memory, load (discounting zope), publishing mechanism (pcgi? ZServer? mod_pcgi?), details of the DTML used), which would be helpful to put this kind of information in context.
I forgot. The server is a Pentium 200 with 96MB RAM, running Redhat Linux 5.2, Apache 1.3.4 and Zope 1.10.2. There was no other significant load on the server when I did the tests. The publishing mechanism is pcgi.
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For instance, I would bet that if you ran that same benchmark using Zope/ZServer instead of PCGI, you would get very different results, having removed the need to spawn a process on every hit. That could indicate that server load/memory/swap/process spawn time considerations are causing the hit seen above. If one were to investigate this and find that such-and-such seemed to cause a big hit on Zope response time, it would be very useful to make this data available to the community. Having this kind of background data would allow folks to better evaluate the kind of server environment they need, and allow us all to decide that Something Must Be Done if a problem seems apparent.
I'll do some experiments. If something speeds up performance I'll notify this list. BTW, how is www.zope.org configured? Do you see the same drastic difference between static pages and Zope pages there? Christian Andreassen: christian@riddlers.com