Hi, I am beginning the planning process for a Zope content management system that will support approximately 8,000 users. It is hard to predict the day-to-day use of the system, so I am trying to think ahead about scalability issues, and I have a number of questions. STATIC FILES One of the suggestions in the literature for improving performance is to allow Apache to serve static files. It would seem, however, that doing so completely takes away the meta data and permission management features of Zope. The LocalFS product, on the other hand, enables you to serve content from the file system and maintain meta data and apply user permissions from Zope. Is there any performance advantage with LocalFS, or is it basically the same as storing the content in Data.fs? DATA.FS LIMITATIONS If all the site's content is stored in Data.fs, I'm concerned that it would quickly grow to a size that would result in performance drag. Since I'm used to the RDBMS world, it seems odd to store all that data in one file. Is there a rule of thumb with respect to the amount of data you can put into Data.fs before performance becomes an issue? ALTERNATIVES TO DATA.FS It seems like the following alternatives to DATA.FS in its default configuration are available: ***Distribution*** This option would involve separating the server that stores the .FS file from the one(s) running Zope. You would do this with a ZeoStorageServer. A variation on this theme would be to use NAS/NFS to put the data on a separate server. ***ExternalMount*** Here you would use the ExternalMount product to store the data for selected portions of ZODB (e.g., for a specific Product) in a separate .FS file, either on the same or a separate server. Presumably this option would mitigate performance issues resulting purely from the size of Data.FS. ***BerkeleyDB or Oracle*** Oracle or Berkeley DB can be used as the storage mechanism instead of .FS. But in doing so do you loose Zope functionality? ***LocalFS*** LocalFS could be used to store large objects (like spreadsheets, PDF files, WAV files, etc.) on the file system and benefit from Zope's meta data and permissions system. In this case, it seems like the data Zope would store would be limited to the meta data and permissions data -- the entire object would not be duplicated in Data.FS. Like the ExternalMount solution, LocalFS would, it seems, alleviate performance issues related to the size of Data.fs. Have I exhausted the possibilities, or are there others? Other there other issues I should be thinking about? Thanks for your help! Regards, Philip Glaser Principal and Software Architect Sustainable Software Solutions, LLC StillSmallVoice@DirectvInternet.com www.sustainsoft.com 973-951-9522