Set the interpreter check interval. This integer value determines how often the interpreter checks for periodic things such as thread switches and signal handlers. The Zope default is 120, but you may want to experiment with other values that may increase performance in your particular environment.
can anybody explain in plain english please. if i decrease the number, what'll happen? if i increase it? what the heck is it anyway?
Roughly: The Python interpreter has a "main loop", and the check interval controls how often (in terms of times through the loop) the interpreter checks for certain housekeeping things. In a fairly large application like Zope, you can get a speedup by decreasing the interval that the runtime has to stop running user code to do housekeeping. Exactly how much speedup you get seems to be very dependent on your exact environment (platform, processor speed, memory, etc.) The default that Zope sets (of 120) seems to give a measurable speedup on the limited platforms that we have available to test. It is configurable so that people who like to tweak can try different values on their particular platform and see if there is a number that gives a better speedup on that platform (usually they use 'ab' or a similar tool to test requests per second on a given url). Hope this helps! Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com