For all concerned: Pystones are an excellent predictor of Zope performance. The pystone program is typically located in $PYTHONPATH/tests/pystone.py -- you run this with your favorite version of Python to get an indicator of how fast your particular system can process Python instructions. Here's a few sample systems I use, all using Python 2.1 as a benchmark python: Intel Celeron 400: 4651 pystones [11.63 * Mhz] UltraSPARC IIe 500: 5556 pystones [11.11 * Mhz] Intel Celeron 500: 5714 pystones [11.43 * Mhz] PowerPC G4 500: 6289 pystones [12.58 * Mhz] Intel Celeron 500: 6849 pystones [13.69 * Mhz] (optimized Python) Intel Pentium III 1Ghz: 12048 pystones [12.05 * Mhz] AMD Athlon XP 2000+: 25756 pystones [15.67 * Mhz, 12.88 * Rating] (ActiveState python) Note that this isn't a very highly scientific sampling; I haven't done lots of averaging and smoothing and data washing, etc. Pystones are pretty closely tied to clock speed (duh!) but are perturbed by CPU and compiler. I tend to accept a figure of roughly 12 * Mhz as a fairly accurate predictor of Python performance. Zope, being an enormous Python program, is highly sensitive to how fast Python can interpret. Thus, you'll find that Zope speeds scale up with CPU speeds. It is probably worth pointing out that the architecture of the CPU isn't nearly as dominant as its clock speed; a UltraSPARC or a PowerPC G4 does not perform much differently than a Pentium or Athlon. It also shows (for you Athlon fans out there) that the Athlon marketing number is fairly accurate with respect to the equivalent Intel performance, i.e. Athlons get about 22% more work done per clock than a Pentium III -- I don't have any Pentium IVs around to test with. I doubt any of this is earth shattering news. The primary conclusion I would draw from this is that you want to optimize clock rate over any other factor for good Zope performance. When considering fitting Zope to various vendor hardware, consider the cost per cycle; SPARC suffers here considerably. -- Matt Kromer Zope Corporation http://www.zope.com/