From: Dieter Maurer <dieter@handshake.de>
I have to admit that I did not make any measurements.
This is what we need, some real world numbers.
However, when I chased errors in "HTTPResponse.HTTPResponse.write" (back in version 2.1.6), I recognized that such a write does not go straight to the HTTP connection but goes through an intermediate file. Thus, your large file is copied once at the server side before it is streamed out to the browser. And there is some Python code around that controls this buffering. Thus, I expect that ZServer is at least twice as slow as direct serving the file.
I wonder why this temp file is used.... but just because a file is used doesn't make it twice as slow. Either the whole system needs to be analyzed or measured.