I'm also very curious about performance on dynamic content. My experience has been, and I think I'm not alone in this, that even with my rarefied understanding of the capabilities of Zope, I find myself exploiting it's advantages. I don't think I have a single static page on my site. I think it's more to do with mindset. I just don't think in terms of "static" pages, I'm more concerned with the logic than the presentation. In fact some of my pages are extremely complex. Perhaps much more than they need to be, but I'm still learning.
Indeed. That test page was indeed one of the few times I've ever used static content in Zope. One of my goals for the future is to test the dynamic capabilties better -- I used static and simple include pages to start with because they are (surprise) easier to set up, especially in translation between DTML/ZPT/JSP/SSI. This will force Apache out and allow JBoss in. Time is all it will take to set up a more realistic test suite. In fact, I suspect that one of the reasons for the speed differences in my tests is that Zope treats all requests (even static ones) with the same procedures regarding security, REQUEST parsing, traversal, et al. Apache and the Java servers are doing few if any of these things: when I make them jump these hoops in the future, we'll see some better comparisons.
Another comment I need to make - this is through experience with my manager. On http://www.zope.org/Members/BwanaZulia/zope_benchmarks/benchmarks.html the key statement is "Tomcat is 2x or 3x faster than Zope when execute an SQL query", the key words being "SQL query". Not pages. Even I missed that first. I'm stating the obvious here, but sometimes even the obvious needs to be restated.
I've stayed away from RDBs so far, but
And a suggestion - I'd be very interested to know if the above was (still) true for DB access.
I can definitely put this on the list. In fact, I already have. It may take a bit to implement (a database is a major component.) --jcc