[Zope] Boosting Zope Performance

[Tony McDonald]

What's the best way of boosting the performance of a Zope site?

In my PHP3 days, we used to have 16 or so httpd processes running (each with
an embedded PHP3 interpreter) and things were pretty ok. I have Zope 2.0b1
running with just two processes.

Is there any mileage in upping this number to something like 16 or so? as
RAM is not a problem for us (our MySQL daemon is running at about 80-90
Megs).
Should I rewrite as many DTML methods as External Methods?
Should I rewrite DTML methods that access the database to do more complex
queries?
Am I missing out on something daft - like have I neglected a switch that has
kept (surmised) debugging code on?
I use MySQL a hell of a lot - is the fact that it is not multi-threaded a
problem too?

Obviously the Zope site is doing a lot more work than a static server
configuration, including many MySQL queries to several different databases
and an awful lot of DTML and External Methods.

I'm using the Zope 2.0b1 binary release on an Enterprise 450 under
Solaris5.6 with half a gig of RAM and 4 processors - it's a fast box. The
problem is that I don't think that the performance I've seen so far will be
acceptable once we let 60-80 students loose on the system.

thanks for any thoughts on the matter.
Tone.