Ben Last (Zope) wrote:
Using Zope to build a consumer-focused website (to support a mobile phone product) that may need to scale to vast numbers of hits. Hence a lot of focus on caching - it's dynamic in the sense that the pages are generated by templates, but they change sufficiently seldom that both levels of Zope cache can be used (as appropriate, as Jamie H. points out) to serve very
Another general point to make about caching, and RAMCacheManager: you can cache *method calls* rather than entire http page requests. Whilst most people just use a RAMCacheManager to cache an entire page ZPT, you can cache individual sub-templates. This can be very useful to pages in which the majority of the page is static, an just a small part changes. We used this technique for an e-Commerce site in which the mail body of the page was a list of products, which was quite expensive to generate. We cache that central area (as a separate ZPT), but we don't cache the containing ZPT which contains things like the shopping basket details, etc.
We're also working on a PlayStation game that has a vast database behind it; that's all Python/MySQL driven, but it uses ZODB for intermediate result caching of some very compute-intensive stuff that can take a couple of days to run.
Cool :) It is always interesting to see systems that don't have the traditional web browser as the client. We did some work using Zope as a backend to a flash-based training app that made calls via XML-RPC to the backend.
Which brings me to a question - I'm at the point of sorting out Zope hosting. Anyone got recommendations for a good hosting company, Linux-based, Zope-literate, that'll scale from a single dedicated server to a load-balanced cluster (as required)? UK preferred, EU second choice, US if we have to (I don't have anything against the US, it's the time difference that can be an issue).
We are UK based (Bristol) and offer hosting. We don't offer shared Zope hosting, as we believe you really need filesystem access to make the most of Zope. We do offer a competitive colocation service, and have experience in scaling Zope and setting up ZEO clusters. Email me off-list if you want more details. -Matt -- Matt Hamilton matth@netsight.co.uk Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Business Vision on the Internet http://www.netsight.co.uk +44 (0)117 9090901 Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting