Jason Bush wrote:
There would
be performance issues indeed, and it would be come more pronounced
with greater amounts of traffic to you website. Also if your database
server and web server
are on seperate machines, if you website received a high amount of
traffic, your
local network would slow from the extra traffic.
In this situation it is almost certain that the network is not
configured optimally for the application. We use a database on a
separate server and have dedicated NICs for the connection to the
database server that are on a different subnet from the traffic
generated by incoming requests. This way we are certain that network
traffic on the front-end won't be a hindrance to the DB requests.
On the subject of performance issues, we host several zope sites that
use an external database and notice very little, if any, performance
degradation from using an external DB. Our application makes use of a
huge amount of highly relational data -- something that lends itself
well to an RBDMS -- and we have had no issues with performance at all.
In fact, when we were prototyping our application we used Python
Products to attempt to store the data and the relationships in the
proper manner. What we found in our case was that Zope was an order of
magnitude slower when emulating a multi-table join than going directly
to the DB with optimized SQL. Of course, YMMV.
Kevin