[Zope] ZODB vs. Gadfly vs. ???

[John Goerzen]

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Hi,

First, thanks to everyone that has helped me along so far!  It is
*tremendously* appreciated!  You can see what I've managed to hack
together thus far at http://www.complete.org:8080/ACLUG/events

Now I need some advice rather than pointers on syntax (though I'm
still learning that, too).  Here's my situation.  I want to put up
information about some things (they happen to be single-time events,
but that's not terribly relevant).  Kevin Dangoor and others suggested 
that I make an Event ZClass, then give it an index_html or whatever to 
fetch the events.  Pretty slick, and it was easier to implement than a 
gadfly thing, with which I had been failing due to not being aware of
_.DateTime().

However, I am running into some problems.  I have only a couple dozen
Event objects in my eventsDb folder, but already there is a noticeable 
performance hit.  It takes the server about 3-4 seconds to render the
above page in calendar mode -- which is completely out of line no this 
server, which is a cream-of-the-crop 600MHz Alpha.  This is, no doubt, due to
inefficiency.  To search for events on a given date, I have to iterate 
through *all* the objects in there, inspecting dates.  This must be
done for each day in a given month to determine whether there is an
event on that day (for displaying on a calendar square).  Ick.

I'm using the Calendar product from the site, incidentally.

So:

 * Am I missing out on some whiz-bang way to do searches through
   a directory full of custom objects?

 * Should I be using Gadfly instead?  Would it be faster?  Why is ZODB
   so slow?

 * In essence, because of the ZODB architecture or my own ignorance
   of how to do it better, I'm getting performance of less than 10
   queries per second.  This is not acceptable.

Also, I am having performance worries.  If the server chokes this fast
with only a couple dozen items, I am concerned.  This server is
normally capable of dishing out many thousands of documents a second,
and even figuring worst-case here, (24 * 30), it's getting only 720
(and those aren't even complete documents, just lookups).  Can someone
help ease my mind on this one?

Many thanks,

John Goerzen

-- 
John Goerzen   Linux, Unix consulting & programming   jgoerzen@complete.org |
Developer, Debian GNU/Linux (Free powerful OS upgrade)       www.debian.org |
----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
The 49,581,309th prime number is 973,777,817.

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Message-ID: <00a401bef649$8b7504a0$7b5addc7@laptop>
From: "Kevin Dangoor" <kid@kendermedia.com>
To: "John Goerzen" <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Subject: Re: [Zope] Many Zope questions
Date: Fri, 3 Sep 1999 16:18:53 -0400
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-----Original Message-----
From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
To: Kevin Dangoor <kid@kendermedia.com>
Cc: zope@zope.org <zope@zope.org>
Date: Friday, September 03, 1999 3:35 PM
Subject: Re: [Zope] Many Zope questions


>"Kevin Dangoor" <kid@kendermedia.com> writes:
>
>> Zope knows what types objects are. For example, if you do:
>> <dtml-var "someDateProperty + 5" fmt="%m/%d/%y">
>> you will get the date five days later than the date stored in the
property.
>>
>> Likewise, if you do:
>> <dtml-var "someDateProperty + 'foo'">
>> I believe you'll get an error. (not sure what adding a string to a date
>> would mean :)
>
>OK, I am confused.  Where did you find these %m/%d/%y things?  I am
>looking in Appendix A of the DTML guide and they aren't mentioned.

I think this is an undocumented feature...

>I am trying to do this:
>
><!--#var when fmt=DayOfWeek-->
>
>(substitute any other date thing for DayOfWeek)
>
>When I leave off fmt, the date is displayed, but it is ugly and with
>an unnecessary timezone, so I want to display it as I wish.  when,
>BTW, comes from a gadfly database.
>
>When I try to view this, though, I get:
>
>Error Type: TypeError
>Error Value: not all arguments converted
>
>What am I doing wrong?

I've never used gadfly. Everything I've been doing with Zope has been within
the ZODB. And I've been a happy camper...

>> This is a fine question. I often look at the source code when I'm curious
>> about something and can't find docs on that specific topic. The Zope
source
>> is very readable.
>
>Ahh.  Well, I don't know Python.  C, Perl, C++, etc., yes, but no
>Python.  I guess I ought to learn it, eh?

Take a look at the source, I think you'll be pleasantly surprised. If you
know C, Perl and C++, you'll probably be able to read the source just fine.

Probably the biggest thing you'll get by looking at parts of the source is a
completely accurate listing of exactly what methods an object has. This
doesn't really require knowing python. Just look for the "class" statements
and the "def" statements (which define methods).

Kevin


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