[Zope] How Fast & Stable??

[Paul Everitt]

Geoff Caplan wrote:
> To be frank, when you get up close most application servers just don't cut
> it. ColdFusion, for example, seems to have some serious reliability
> problems. Until I spotted Zope, I was pretty much resigned to a
> belt-and-braces solution with Perl/Velocigen or Tcl/AolServer. Not an easy
> route, but at least it would be reliable.

Understood.
 
> Compared to raw coding, a Python/Zope/Apache/Solid solution looks
> attractive, to say the least. But at this relatively early stage in its
> development, can Zope truly deliver?

Just a quick correction, though -- chances are that Zope is older than
Tcl/Aolserver, and probably older than the Perl binding to Velocigen.

Zope is the unholy union of three former pieces of software:

1) Bobo, the Python Object Publisher.  A free pieces of software, first
used in a commercial setting in 1996.

2) Principia, Digital Creation's commercial appserver upsell from Bobo. 
First used in a commercial setting in May 1997.

3) Aqueduct, relational database integration with Bobo/Principia.  First
used in a commercial setting in Jan 1997.

The project that drove Principia's development was a online classified
ad system for newspapers.  By the time our involvement with the product
finished in 1998, it was serving 100 papers, over a million hits a day,
and over a million ads a week.

The death march on that project taught us a *whole* lot about scale and
reliability.  The Zope2 *architecture* represents the fulfilled vision
of those goals.  (Zope2 itself went out missing some of the extras, like
spreading your object database storage across multiple files.)
 
> So a plea to you folks who are actually using Zope 2 in a production
> setting - is it fast enough and stable enough for us to (literally) bet our
> house on? It will be running unattended on a remote server (probably Linux).
> We are planning a niche storefront site which will probably get modest
> traffic of around 50,000 hits a day with around 3,000 products in the
> database.

Oh its definately fast enough, unless all 50k hits happen in the same
minute. :^)  Seriously, Zope should do over ten hits per second for even
complicated pages, over 30 hits per second for less complicated pages.

One programming note: within the next month we'll check in the work for
FastCGI, meaning you can sit behind Apache and not pay the fork tax.
 
> Zope is obviously a great product, and most people on this list will be
> evangelists. But I really would appreciate your objective views. If you
> prefer privacy, please contact me direct: geoff@productivity.co.uk.

Oh, you wanted *objective* views. :^)

--Paul