[Zope] Large Portal requirements (was: Other web servers?)

[Jimmie Houchin]

At 01:22 PM 6/14/99 -0400, Michel Pelletier wrote:
[snip]
>> #2: Do I understand correctly that **every** page is built and served
>> dynamically?  Is there a performance issue here, since static 
>> html serve the fastest?  Much of our content will be static pages, but
we need
>> ease-of-use for publishing by non-web persons.
>
>Every page is served 'dynamicly' in that it is pulled from the object
>database.  However, pages do not need to be rendered if they do not
>contain any DTML scripting.  When a document is added, the DTML is
>compiled for speed, it is not parsed and compiled on every access.  
>
>Zope is much faster than traditional CGI solutions for "dynamicly"
>generating content, since the Zope process is running all the time,
>there is no fork and exec'ing of an interpreter overhead.
>
>Also, I have no benchmarks on traditional file serving vs. serving from
>the object database, I would venture a wager however that you will not
>notice it even under heavy loads.  Zope 1.x has been proven to do well
>over a million hits a day on modest hardware, and Zope 2.0 will be able
>to perform much faster and smoother than that.  Given also that it is
>written in Python and not (god forbid) Java means that it is very
>cross-platform and can run on every platform that python can run on and
>that you can compile C python extensions onto.

Howabout for database intensive situations like one encounters in some of
the larger sites like Altavista, Goto, Yahoo, Amazon, etc.

Here are very, very large databases, probably very large indexes,
multi-millions of objects, multi-multi-gigabytes to search, index.
My concern is because Python does not scale with multiple processor
machines, this limits ones ability to throw hardware at the situation since
you are limited to the fastest single processor.

Do I misunderstand anything.

Would Zope be appropriate for these situations? How well would Zope handle it?

For example in an article I read concerning the delay in Intel bringing out
it's chipset for 8way Pentium III servers. Barnes and Noble was talking
about beta-testing an 8way server to speed up their searches.

Now I understand that different development models yield different results
and I don't know how Barnes and Noble's website is built. I do know that
B&N has a very large database with multi-millions of objects with many,
many gigs of data.

Would Zope be appropriate?

I know that my website will have similar and greater requirements
concerning database size and searching. Hopefully hits/traffics also will
be high.

Zope and Python are my first choice.

Thanks for any help.

Jimmie Houchin

[snip]