I guess the subscribers to this list, more or less, like working with Zope. Developing dynamic pages is quick and easy, and code/design integration is very comfortable.

However I'm starting to doubt if it's worth it. Some quick benchmarking with apache's ab utitlity gave the following results on my server(50 requests, no concurrency, ab ran on the server machine):

Copy of the Zope welcome screen(served from disk): 204.08 requests per second The Zope welcome screen(served from Zope): 14.38 requests per second A page with lots of DTML Code(about 50 lines): 2.68 requests per second

I'm not that familiar with ab, but you don't give a lot of information on your setup here (processor, memory, load (discounting zope), publishing mechanism (pcgi? ZServer? mod_pcgi?), details of the DTML used), which would be helpful to put this kind of information in context. The numbers you give above seem _way_ low to me compared to some general benchmarking that has been done in the past. The only really reliable benchmark, of course, is a real live site - and Zope is currently running a number of rather high-traffic sites without problems (and with far better throughput than the numbers you got with ab). Note that I'm not discounting your results above, I just suspect that there is an underlying reason for them. Having done some benchmarking in the past, I'm a firm believer that you can prove anything you want with a benchmark - just ask the Apache group, who were totally hosed in a recent (laughable) NT/IIS vs. Linux/Apache benchmark :) That said, we do not think that benchmarking it useless - we are very receptive to constructive criticism, and having members of the Zope community develop credible benchmarks is a great way to help discover and solve performance problems. If nothing else, it would provide some comparative information to the community on how best to field Zope based on their performance requirements and server environment. For instance, I would bet that if you ran that same benchmark using Zope/ZServer instead of PCGI, you would get very different results, having removed the need to spawn a process on every hit. That could indicate that server load/memory/swap/process spawn time considerations are causing the hit seen above. If one were to investigate this and find that such-and-such seemed to cause a big hit on Zope response time, it would be very useful to make this data available to the community. Having this kind of background data would allow folks to better evaluate the kind of server environment they need, and allow us all to decide that Something Must Be Done if a problem seems apparent. Brian Lloyd brian@digicool.com Software Engineer 540.371.6909 Digital Creations http://www.digicool.com