Hi folks Thanks for your very full and thoughtful replies. I am sorry I have not responded sooner, but I was called away from the office on a personal matter... Reading your replies, the thing that most concerns me is the question of how to get around the limitations of CGI. I'm afraid that I am not up to speed yet on all the details of the different approaches. Can some kind person please spell out the alternatives, with their pros and cons? If speed and scalability is the priority, what is the recommended approach?
From the tone of the thread, it looks as if things are moving towards FastCGI. I am also looking at a solution with Tcl/Velocigen, and the guys there write that:
>>>> Freely available interfaces do exist that use the FastCGI standard. These other solutions require you to dedicate a single process for each script executed and encourage the creation of fewer and larger, more complex scripts, rather than many smaller, easy to manage scripts.
Also, these other FastCGI Perl implementations require you to know the details of the FastCGI protocol, and force you to manage memory and system resources.
>>>>
Do these factors apply when FastCGI is used with Zope - or is Zope smart enough to handle memory and system resource management for the developer? Sorry if these are ignorant questions - this is a new field for me! Thanks Geoff Caplan