Dieter Thanks for your answer and advice..
I am curious how do you all think LocalFS would perform for such a big multimedia application.? http://www.zope.org/Members/jfarr/Products/LocalFS In my view, LocalFS is an excellent product. I like it very much.
However, I would not upload and not serve objects with a size of several hundred megabytes through ZServer (and thereby through Zope). As I said in an earlier response, ZServer is at least on order of magnitude slower with static content than Apache. This matters, if you transfer big objects!
OK, sorry to be so dense about this, but when you say "through ZServer" ..please clarify for me on thing: Does LocalFS actually go "through ZServer" ? I thought that all it does, is to make a virtual link, storing a pointer in the ZODB to the real physical file system. Upload thus via FTP would be as fast as could be, and download could be defined if you prefer FTP or HTTP. Does'nt the link in LocalFS work the same in both directions, merely storing the linkn in XODB adn pass the location to the protocol?
Recently, there has been some simple benchmarks for Zope versus Apache performance in this list. Search the archive (there is a searchable one at NIP) to get a feeling about the bandwidth.
You may well use LocalFS to view the metadata (id, size, modification time, ...) from Zope, but you should not go through ZServer for upload and HTTP requests to really large objects.
Again I dont understand. With LocalFS, isn't the "really large object" outside of Zope. Surely it does not care how big the file is? All it cares about is its location, and any extra metadata IF you choose to store it in Zope. yes / no? thanks - Jason