Celso Martinho wrote:
I'm new to this list, so escuse the dumb questions.
no problem. My first one was "zope says it doesn't have permissions to the var directory! what's wrong?"
I am responsable for the development team of SAPO, the most popular and visited Portuguese portal.
Hi, I am responsible for the (re)development of the web site for Instituto Português de Arqueologia.
1. It is often mentioned that Zope is very scalable. But how does it scale? We currently have an architeture that consists in several backends with SQL databases and NFS servers and about 5 mirrored frontends with Apaches delivering static and dynamic web pages, load balanced by an Alteon Ace Director Switch. Would Zope fit in such an environment ?
http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/SiteAccess SiteAccess is a new product that might help you handle the mirroring/backend management. All pages from Zope are dynamic. Zope fits fine behind Apache. I don't know the details of your load balancing, but that should continue to work.
2. How well does Zope performs ? Are there any benchmarks ? I was not very impressed with the results of an "ab" (Apache Benchmark Program) I did to Zserver requesting 1000 pages with 200 concurrent requests.
What were the results? Earlier posts suggest that ZServer is good for about 45 requests/sec.
And how bad is it to use PCGI/Apache instead of ZServer ?
It knocks it down to about 20 requests a sec. (performance quotes are from memory)
Is the future of Zope focused in developing Zserver or integrating Zope well with other Web Server such as Apache ?
They are working on a FastCGI implementation for Zope that should eliminate the fork penalty for using Apache, as well as allowing use with a wider variety of other web servers. The integrated FTP and WebDAV protocols will still require ZServer, and I don't imagine that will change soon.
Thank you very much for your time. I hope you can help and convince us to become Zopers. :)
I don't think it would be a bad decision at all. :-) -- ~mindlace webworker