[Zope] ZOPE, Medusa and the ZD WebBench 3.0 test suite...

[Jim Salmons]

The June 8th issue of PC Magazine has an extensive cover story, "How to
Create a Great Site," which includes a number of sub-articles, Design It,
Polish It, Build It and Serve It. This cover story is pitched to small
businesses considering going on-line.

In this regard, there are a number of oversights and mismatches in terms of
the products and services they have included or excluded in these subsection
round-ups. For example, they give Editors' Choice awards to FrontPage 2000
and Dreamweaver 2 in the Design It section in a shoot-out which does not
include Allaire's Homesite. And their Polish It section, for site management
and promotion, did not include FirstPlace Software's excellent WebPosition
Gold. (Ok, my personal preferences are showing, but I include them here to
give you an idea of how unusually sloppy and rushed much of this massive
feature seems to me. I usually count on ZD Labs to give me credible
"Consumers' Digest" type pre-purchase information.)

The Build It section ratchets up a level from static WYSIWYG authoring,
covered in the Design It section, to products which provide back-end
database connectivity and other commerce-oriented features. In a sidebar,
application servers are covered, stating that "Cons" for their use is the
requirement to learn Java or C++ and that such environments have generally
higher software costs!? Obviously the editorial team is unaware of ZOPE. (I
plan to write a "Dear Editors" letter to bring this and other oversights of
the full article to their attention, but suggest that there is "strength in
numbers" so anyone else inclined to do the same, I encourage you to chime
in.)

But most disturbing are the results published for the OS and Server tests in
the Serve It section. As you will see if you check this out, NT and IIS
shine, especially with regard to dynamic page serving and SSL performance.
Linux/Apache have a poor showing. In the fine print, the editors do reveal
that, due to a bug in the TCP/IP stack, the ZD Labs were unable to run the
test suite against the latest 2.2 kernel!? I certainly hope they do a "2nd
Look" update of this shoot-out and provide such updated performance
information.

But here's the real intent of this note... ZD Labs reports that this
shoot-out marks the debut of WebBench 3.0. This test suite is designed to
stress test web servers. They give full details of the network config, etc.
on pages 170-172.

My question, and the one I expect is on many of your minds, is... How does a
ZOPE/Medusa server config stack up? My hope and expectation that the
underlying Medusa architecture might really shine when compared to the
pre-allocating multi-process approach of Apache, etc.

Does anybody in the ZOPE community have the resources to run the WebBench
test suite? Does anybody have the contacts and/or clout to supply ZD Labs an
appropriately configured ZOPE/Medusa server to perform such a test? And
finally, are we at the point where such a test would be in our best
interest, or do we bide our time and "leap from the bushes" when our planets
are slightly more aligned (as in following the 2.0 roll-out)?

A curious ZOPEer,
--Jim Salmons--
<salmons@sohodojo.com>

P.S. I live in the RTP area of North Carolina, so if anyone in this area
wants to perform such tests and needs a hand, please do not hesitate to ask
for help.