I installed Zope 2.5.1b2 + CMF1.2 + Plone 0.9.9PR5 <snip> All this on a Pentium 233, 128MB, no swapping. Hardly any other activity on this machine.
If you have a large Data.fs with a lot of products, it is normal to see a long startup time. But if this was a fresh Zope, then I would not expect the startup on your hardware to take more than 15 seconds at the most.
There are two possibilities:
1) Your system has a bottleneck you aren't aware of, processes blocking, running out of file descriptors, etc. 2) Python or Zope has some bug w.r.t your system.
3) You have used a cvs CMF version too long ;-) My guess is that 7 minutes on a P233 to login is normal, if you are using Plone that uses PageTemplates, and CMF1.2 that does not have support for delayed cooking. There is a HUGE difference in startup time/first access time when using CMF cvs with delayed PageTemplates cooking support. /Magnus