[Zope] Redirect methods, Zserver vs. Apache

[Matthew J. Probst]

Thanks for the input/discussion on virtual hosts, ZServer vs. Apache, and
the two methods I can think of to support different virtual hosts with
Zope on the same machine.

The resource usage I'm most interested in is memory, not processor time.
It would appear that a threaded Zserver could replace my anonymous FTP
daemon, Apache, and a set of custom site-building scripts with a
constantly running instance of Python.  A threaded and interpreted
approach is my first choice; if it weren't so expensive I would be using
Roxen with SiteBuilder even though it lacks the object orientation of
Zope.  The machine serving my web sites does not have unlimited memory,
and I think it's ridiculous to expect an ISP's machine to run tens or
hundreds of copies of a process no matter how well the OS can deal with
it.

So, assuming that I want to take the risk of going with the newer ZServer
included with 2.x alpha, how do I best go about enhancing it to support my
needs, and increasing the chances of a stable site?  I assume using it
with older versions of other components would help, as would learning
about the interface between ZServer and the publisher.  I'm interested in
redirecting different virtual domains into (a) seperate Zope processes or
(b) different branches of the Zope tree.  (b) sounds more interesting to
me for reasons of resource usage and sharing of elements between several
sites.

Roxen had some interesting characteristics related to plugging in network
service "modules" that could handle things like proxy caching, FTP
service, and enhanced HTML processing.  Is this similar to Zope's products
combined with Medusa as a framework for network services?  Roxen's
implementation was buggy or incomplete but looked promising.