[Zope] Possible new user questions

[Sam Gendler]

>
>
> For all the magazine talk about everybody needing something capable of
> sustaining some ridiculous number of page hits/sec, I don't personally
> know anyone operating a site that Zope couldn't keep up with.  If you're
> Amazon.com, maybe you'd look into ZEO or something, but if you're
> putting up a Linux user group page or something along those lines,
> Zope's probably going to frequently be tapping its fingers waiting for
> the next request.
>

All it takes is some credit card processing over SSL with Apache and you will
definitely need multiple servers.  As a benchmark, on a dual processor 450Mhz
webserver with lots of RAM and a rainbow SSL card, running Linux 2.2.x kernel
and a recent version of apache, we never saw more than 150 transactions/second
with normal requests to static objects in apache.  This was on a platform that
can do over 1000 TPS without SSL.  The overhead for SSL is huge.  If you also
include the length of most CC processing transactions, you also have to deal
with requests that last 20 seconds instead of .5 seconds.  This causes very
intensive resource utilization.

Now translate those numbers to Zope.  Zope starts out with no more than 150 TPS
on the same hardware.  Now throw in SSL and it probably drops to 20 or 30 TPS.
Add in 20 second long transactions, especially with our friend, the python
interpreter lock, and you run into real performance issues.  However, if you
have a machine that is dedicated to running the credit card processing, you can
build the entire transaction in zope, but then have the final submit button link
to a credit card processing box that is just running straight apache.  I should
imagine that you would have reasonable performance numbers that way.  If your
site only processes 1 or 2 credit cards per second, you probably will have no
problem, regardless of your solution.  I had the joy if building a system that
could process 1000 Credit cards/second, and it was not fun (no we didn't use
zope, I didn't know about it yet).  Of course, it turned out that Visa
themselves only process about 4000 cards/second, so we had a few spare cycles in
the end ;-)

--sam