[Zope] migrate to zclasses and zodb from rdb or not ? plus high availability. availability.

[chas]

hi again, 

i've been guilty in the past of going overboard with a new
technology that i become enamoured with. so, before i go over the 
top with zclasses, can i just play out this scenario and seek input
on the appropriateness of zclasses :

a city guide site with events and locations pretty much like 
citysearch.com ;  data is currently held in a relational database (mysql)
which allow for great sorting of data (especially with one-to-many
relationships for dates of events). images are stored on the 
filesystem and the entire mysql database can be held in memory making 
for very fast queries. why move this to zope's object database ?
i'm only concerned with performance on the website.... we have
security and data-entry all sorted out anyway so ACL's etc are
not a factor. performance is paramount.*

* i will admit that if we were building this site from scratch,
  it would have been a no-brainer :  zclasses would have saved
  me buiding all those tedious management screens which seem to
  accompany every app !!!! 

it especially seems weird to move images to the zodb as mentioned
in some previous threads because that would increase the size of 
the database such that it might not be able to sit permanently in 
RAM


finally , whilst zope is looking excellent for application development,
i'd be lying if i were to say that i am not nervous about  using it on
my production machine. 

i'm in the midst of converting a website with 2-3 million hits/day 
which is 200,000-300,000 page views (80% of which are dynamically
generated) to zope. we're using apache and cgi right now and the server
is handling it admirably (PIII 450, 512 MB RAM, U-W SCSI, FreeBSD 3.2). 
apache has been rock solid. 

is anyone handling comparable loads on zope at the moment ? 
using zserver or zope-on-apache ?

sorry for the long questions 

cheers, chas