[Zope] Zope lobbyists, anyone?

[Chris Larson]

I'm trying to get Zope running at my ISP, and want to be able to lobby 
them as best I can. To this end, I'm trying to get as best a handle on 
the, um, environmental impact, let's say, of running Zope as I can. Can 
someone help me out here, mebbe point me to an overview of what exactly 
is required, vis-a-vis system resources? My site at this point is fairly 
low traffic, and fairly simple. I've posted a couple of short responses 
I've had in discussion with the admin below. I'd like to be able to 
respond to him with as much technical impact info as possible. How much 
memory is expected to be used, is the program gonna be launching multiple 
processes, etc.

As I understand it, Zope launches one process, and that's it. Part of the 
problem right now is that I'm playing with it in a user account that 
launches processes as user 'www', and that Zope is very unstable in the 
current environment. Apparently, nfs causes rapid corruption of the 
database, causing 'serious application errors' following which I have a 
hard time tracking down and/or killing the process(es) left behind. This 
situation should change soon, as far as the 'user' running the processes 
at least.

In a nutshell, I'm a relatively uninformed  newbie, with an intermittent 
relationship with unix (linux), and I'm trying to figure out why nfs 
kills Zope, while I wait for my ISP to migrate my Apache virtual account 
to a machine with Python 1.5.1, after which at least processes will be 
launched as my user. I desperately want to implement Zope, but am faced 
with the issues of system impact, of which I have no idea, with the 
probability that I'll be faced with a no-threads Python (RedHat default, 
see below), with an ISP who may be reluctant to allow me to implement 
Zope, depending on the above-mentioned impact, and with the fact that I'm 
probably be stuck dealing with nfs.

If any of the above are killers, I'd appreciate a heads-up, and if anyone 
can provide me with a concise overview of what Zope'll do to the systemm 
and/or other issues that might frighten an ISP away, I would be eternally 
(well, indefinitely, at least) indebted.

Actually, it would be nice if the resource stuff were covered in the ISP 
FAQ, no?

Much, much thanks,

Chris Larson
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On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Chris Larson wrote:

> Does the system kill long-running processes initiated by users who are 
> not logged in? If I have a cgi-wrapper that launches a process, will that 
> process remain running, as it should, or will it be killed?

It only kills them when the parent process dies.  A long-term process may
never die if the parent's don't die.  

BTW, I have had to kill copies of your python program on www-01 and www-03
earlier today and last Saturday.  They seem to never die (because our
webserver does not die and they don't exit on their own).  

Have you ever looked at other versions of this program?  It seems that the
one you are using is trying to use an awful lot of resident memory on the
systems.  If it gets to be repetitive that I am killing your processes,
then I may have to disable your program alltogether (removing execute
bits).

---

On Fri, 12 Feb 1999, Chris Larson wrote:

> I need access to a Python 1.5.1 or higher, compiled with threads.

We're just going to be using the default redhat-supported version of
python (their compile).  I don't know if it is suitable for what you need.

>I need to be running everything on a machine where nfs will not come into 
>play ... I've been able to get my application running on www-01, through my 
> user account, but within a few minutes, everytime, the db becomes 
> corrupted and I need to reinstall from scratch.

You might consider a database such as MySQL which we do have setup on our
system and you can use it along with php or perl to handle a database. 
Those databases are located on local directories and each virtual server
has a mysql server running on it.