[Zope] Zope in Portals

[Celso Martinho]

Hello,

I'm new to this list, so escuse the dumb questions.

I am responsable for the development team of SAPO, the most popular
and visited Portuguese portal. We are delivering about 10 milion pages
per month and growing quickly. We are evaluation solutions for the
future of our already complex struture in terms of content management,
site administration and publishing.

I came across Zope from several sources and decided to give a deep look.
Installed the software and read most of the guides and FAQs. We are
very impressed with Zope's concept and feature list but we still have
a few questions we would like answered:

1. It is often mentioned that Zope is very scalable. But how does it scale?
We currently have an architeture that consists in several backends with
SQL databases and NFS servers and about 5 mirrored frontends with Apaches
delivering static and dynamic web pages, load balanced by an Alteon Ace Director
Switch. Would Zope fit in such an environment ? Are there any case studies
or testimonials using something like this?

2. How well does Zope performs ? Are there any benchmarks ? I was not
very impressed with the results of an "ab" (Apache Benchmark Program) I
did to Zserver requesting 1000 pages with 200 concurrent requests. And
how bad is it to use PCGI/Apache instead of ZServer ? Is the future
of Zope focused in developing Zserver or integrating Zope well with
other Web Server such as Apache ?

3. It seemed to me that Zope doesn't support mySQL very well, being Oracle
mentioned all the time. As mySQL is still our main SQL platform, i ask if
mySQL DA is still being supported and/or developed?

Thank you very much for your time. I hope you can help and convince us
to become Zopers. :)

Celso.
-- 
Celso Martinho            SAPO - Servidor de Apontadores Portugueses
Director Técnico          # +351.1.3133600 - http://www.sapo.pt/
E-Mail: celso@sl.pt